Relationship between religion and science

The relationship between religion and science has been a subject of study since classical antiquity, addressed by philosophers, theologians, scientists, and others. Perspectives from different geographical regions, cultures and historical epochs are diverse, with some characterizing the relationship as one of conflict, others describing it as one of harmony, and others proposing little interaction.

Both science and religion are complex social and cultural endeavors that vary across cultures and have changed over time.[1] Most scientific and technical innovations prior to the scientific revolution were achieved by societies organized by religious traditions. Elements of the scientific method were pioneered by ancient pagan, Islamic, and Christian scholars, during the Islamic Golden Age foundations for the scientific method were laid by Ibn al-Haytham.[2][3]Roger Bacon, who is often credited with formalizing the scientific method, was a Franciscan friar.[4] Hinduism has historically embraced reason and empiricism, holding that science brings legitimate, but incomplete knowledge of the world. Confucian thought has held different views of science over time. Most Buddhists today view science as complementary to their beliefs. While the classification of the material world by the ancient Indians and Greeks into air, earth, fire and water was more philosophical, medieval Middle Easterns used practical and experimental observation to classify materials.[5]

Public acceptance of scientific facts may be influenced by religion; many in the United States reject evolution by natural selection, especially regarding human beings. Nevertheless, the American National Academy of Sciences has written that "the evidence for evolution can be fully compatible with religious faith", a view officially endorsed by many religious denominations globally.[9]

The concepts of "science" and "religion" are a recent invention: "religion" emerged in the 17th century in the midst of colonization and globalization and the Protestant Reformation,[10][11][12] "science" emerged in the 19th century in the midst of attempts to narrowly define those who studied nature,[10][13][14] and the phrase "religion and science" emerged in the 19th century due to the reification of both concepts.[10] It was in the 19th century that the terms "Buddhism", "Hinduism", "Taoism", and "Confucianism" first emerged;[10][12] in the ancient and medieval world, the etymological Latin roots of both science (scientia) and religion (religio) were understood as inner qualities of the individual or virtues, never as doctrines, practices, or actual sources of knowledge.[10]

It was in the 19th century that the concept of "science" received its modern shape with new titles emerging such as "biology" and "biologist", "physics" and "physicist" among other technical fields and titles; institutions and communities were founded, and unprecedented applications to and interactions with other aspects of society and culture occurred.[13] The term scientist was first coined by the naturalist-theologian William Whewell in 1834 and it was applied to those who sought knowledge and understanding of nature,[10][15] from the ancient world, starting with Aristotle, to the 19th century, the term "natural philosophy" was the common term used to describe the practice of studying nature.[13][16] Isaac Newton's book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), whose title translates to "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy", reflects the then-current use of the words "natural philosophy", akin to "systematic study of nature". Even in the 19th century, a treatise by Lord Kelvin and Peter Guthrie Tait's, which helped define much of modern physics, was titled Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1867).

It was in the 17th century that the concept of "religion" received its modern shape despite the fact that ancient texts like the Bible, the Quran, and other sacred texts did not have a concept of religion in the original languages and neither did the people or the cultures in which these sacred texts were written;[11] in the 19th century, Max Müller noted that what is called ancient religion today, would have been called "law" in antiquity.[17] For example, there is no precise equivalent of "religion" in Hebrew, and Judaism does not distinguish clearly between religious, national, racial, or ethnic identities,[18] the Sanskrit word "dharma", sometimes translated as "religion", also means law or duty. Throughout classical South Asia, the study of law consisted of concepts such as penance through piety and ceremonial as well as practical traditions. Medieval Japan at first had a similar union between "imperial law" and universal or "Buddha law", but these later became independent sources of power.[19][20] Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of "religion" since there was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning, but when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties demanding, among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with this Western idea.[12]

The development of sciences (especially natural philosophy) in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, has considerable foundation in the works of the Arabs who translated Greek and Latincompositons.[21] The works of Aristotle played a major role in the institutionalization, systematization, and expansion of reason. Christianity accepted reason within the ambit of faith. In Christendom, reason was considered subordinate to revelation, which contained the ultimate truth and this truth could not be challenged. Even though the medieval Christian had the urge to use their reason, they had little on which to exercise it; in medieval universities, the faculty for natural philosophy and theology were separate, and discussions pertaining to theological issues were often not allowed to be undertaken by the faculty of philosophy.[22][page needed]

Natural philosophy, as taught in the arts faculties of the universities, was seen as an essential area of study in its own right and was considered necessary for almost every area of study, it was an independent field, separated from theology, which enjoyed a good deal of intellectual freedom as long as it was restricted to the natural world. In general, there was religious support for natural science by the late Middle Ages and a recognition that it was an important element of learning.[21]

The extent to which medieval science led directly to the new philosophy of the scientific revolution remains a subject for debate, but it certainly had a significant influence.[23]

The Middle Ages laid ground for the developments that took place in science, during the Renaissance which immediately succeeded it, with significant developments taking place in science, mathematics, medicine and philosophy, the relationship between science and religion became one of curiosity and questioning.[23][page needed] As humanism became more and more popular, people tried to understand the nature around them better, rather than turn to religious aspirations. Renaissance humanism looked to classical Greek and Roman texts to change contemporary thought, allowing for a new mindset after the Middle Ages. Renaissance readers understood these classical texts as focusing on human decisions, actions and creations, rather than blindly following the rules set forth by the Catholic Church as "God's plan." Though many Renaissance humanists remained religious, they believed God gave humans opportunities and it was humanity's duty to do the "best and most moral thing". Renaissance humanism was an "ethical theory and practice that emphasized reason, scientific inquiry and human fulfillment in the natural world," said Abernethy.[24] By 1630, ancient authority from classical literature and philosophy, as well as their necessity, started eroding, although scientists were still expected to be fluent in Latin, the international language of Europe's intellectuals, with the sheer success of science and the steady advance of rationalism, the individual scientist gained prestige.[23]

Along with the inventions of this period, especially the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg, allowed for the dissemination of the Bible in languages of the common people (languages other than Latin). This allowed more people to read and learn from the scripture, leading to the Evangelical movement, the people who spread this message, concentrated more on individual agency rather than the structures of the Church.[24]

According to Richard Dawkins, "not only is science corrosive to religion; religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial, supernatural non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp, it teaches them to accept authority, revelation and faith instead of always insisting on evidence."[25]

The kinds of interactions that might arise between science and religion have been categorized, according to theologian, Anglican priest and physicist John Polkinghorne are: (1) conflict between the disciplines, (2) independence of the disciplines, (3) dialogue between the disciplines where they overlap and (4) integration of both into one field.[26]

According to Guillermo Paz-y-Miño-C and Avelina Espinosa, the historical conflict between evolution and religion is intrinsic to the incompatibility between scientificrationalism/empiricism and the belief in supernatural causation;[30] these authors have formally proposed the incompatibility hypothesis (IH) to explain the "everlasting-conflict-science-and-faith".[31] According to Jerry Coyne, views on evolution and levels of religiosity in some countries, along with the existence of books explaining reconciliation between evolution and religion, indicate that people have trouble in believing both at the same time, thus implying incompatibility.[32] According to Lawrence Krauss, compatibility or incompatibility is a theological concern, not a scientific concern;[32] in Lisa Randall's view, questions of incompatibility or otherwise are not answerable, since by accepting revelations one is abandoning rules of logic which are needed to identify if there are indeed contradictions between holding certain beliefs.[32]Daniel Dennett holds that incompatibility exists because religion is not problematic to a certain point before it collapses into a number of excuses for keeping certain beliefs, in light of evolutionary implications.[32]

According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, the central difference between the nature of science and religion is that the claims of science rely on experimental verification, while the claims of religions rely on faith, and these are irreconcilable approaches to knowing, because of this both are incompatible as currently practiced and the debate of compatibility or incompatibility will be eternal.[33][34] Philosopher and physicist Victor J. Stenger's view is that science and religion are incompatible due to conflicts between approaches of knowing and the availability of alternative plausible natural explanations for phenomena that is usually explained in religious contexts.[35]

Richard Dawkins is hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. According to Dawkins, religion "subverts science and saps the intellect",[36] he believes that when science teachers attempt to expound on evolution, there is hostility aimed towards them by parents who are skeptical because they believe it conflicts with their religious beliefs, that even some textbooks have had the word 'evolution' systematically removed.[37] According to Sean M. Carroll, since religion makes claims that are not compatible with science, such as supernatural events, therefore both are incompatible.[38]

Others such as Francis Collins, Kenneth R. Miller, George Coyne and Francisco J. Ayala argue for compatibility since they do not agree that science is incompatible with religion and vice versa. They argue that science provides many opportunities to look for and find God in nature and to reflect on their beliefs.[39] According to Kenneth Miller, he disagrees with Jerry Coyne's assessment and argues that since significant portions of scientists are religious and the proportion of Americans believing in evolution is much higher, it implies that both are indeed compatible.[32] Elsewhere, Miller has argued that when scientists make claims on science and theism or atheism, they are not arguing scientifically at all and are stepping beyond the scope of science into discourses of meaning and purpose. What he finds particularly odd and unjustified is in how atheists often come to invoke scientific authority on their non-scientific philosophical conclusions like there being no point or no meaning to the universe as the only viable option when the scientific method and science never have had any way of addressing questions of meaning or God in the first place. Furthermore, he notes that since evolution made the brain and since the brain can handle both religion and science, there is no natural incompatibility between the concepts at the biological level.[40]

Karl Giberson argues that when discussing compatibility, some scientific intellectuals often ignore the viewpoints of intellectual leaders in theology and instead argue against less informed masses, thereby, defining religion by non intellectuals and slanting the debate unjustly, he argues that leaders in science sometimes trump older scientific baggage and that leaders in theology do the same, so once theological intellectuals are taken into account, people who represent extreme positions like Ken Ham and Eugenie Scott will become irrelevant.[32] Cynthia Tolman notes that religion does not have a method per se partly because religions emerge through time from diverse cultures, but when it comes to Christian theology and ultimate truths, she notes that people often rely on scripture, tradition, reason, and experience to test and gauge what they experience and what they should believe.[41]

The conflict thesis, which holds that religion and science have been in conflict continuously throughout history, was popularized in the 19th century by John William Draper's and Andrew Dickson White's accounts. It was in the 19th century that relationship between science and religion became an actual formal topic of discourse, while before this no one had pitted science against religion or vice versa, though occasional complex interactions had been expressed before the 19th century.[42] Most contemporary historians of science now reject the conflict thesis in its original form and no longer support it.[43][44][45][6][7][8][46] Instead, it has been superseded by subsequent historical research which has resulted in a more nuanced understanding:[47][48] Historian of science, Gary Ferngren, has stated "Although popular images of controversy continue to exemplify the supposed hostility of Christianity to new scientific theories, studies have shown that Christianity has often nurtured and encouraged scientific endeavour, while at other times the two have co-existed without either tension or attempts at harmonization. If Galileo and the Scopes trial come to mind as examples of conflict, they were the exceptions rather than the rule."[49]

Most historians today have moved away from a conflict model, which is based mainly on two historical episodes (Galileo and Darwin) for a "complexity" model, because religious figures were on both sides of each dispute and there was no overall aim by any party involved to discredit religion.[50]

An often cited example of conflict, that has been clarified by historical research in the 20th century, was the Galileo affair, whereby interpretations of the Bible were used to attack ideas by Copernicus on heliocentrism. By 1616 Galileo went to Rome to try to persuade Catholic Church authorities not to ban Copernicus' ideas; in the end, a decree of the Congregation of the Index was issued, declaring that the ideas that the Sun stood still and that the Earth moved were "false" and "altogether contrary to Holy Scripture", and suspending Copernicus's De Revolutionibus until it could be corrected. Galileo was found "vehemently suspect of heresy", namely of having held the opinions that the Sun lies motionless at the center of the universe, that the Earth is not at its centre and moves, he was required to "abjure, curse and detest" those opinions.[51] However, before all this, Pope Urban VIII had personally asked Galileo to give arguments for and against heliocentrism in a book, and to be careful not to advocate heliocentrism as physically proven since the scientific consensus at the time was that the evidence for heliocentrism was very weak, the Church had merely sided with the scientific consensus of the time. Pope Urban VIII asked that his own views on the matter be included in Galileo's book. Only the latter was fulfilled by Galileo. Whether unknowingly or deliberately, Simplicio, the defender of the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic geocentric view in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was often portrayed as an unlearned fool who lacked mathematical training. Although the preface of his book claims that the character is named after a famous Aristotelian philosopher (Simplicius in Latin, Simplicio in Italian), the name "Simplicio" in Italian also has the connotation of "simpleton".[52] Unfortunately for his relationship with the Pope, Galileo put the words of Urban VIII into the mouth of Simplicio. Most historians agree Galileo did not act out of malice and felt blindsided by the reaction to his book.[53] However, the Pope did not take the suspected public ridicule lightly, nor the physical Copernican advocacy. Galileo had alienated one of his biggest and most powerful supporters, the Pope, and was called to Rome to defend his writings.[54]

The actual evidences that finally proved heliocentrism came centuries after Galileo: the stellar aberration of light by James Bradley in the 18th century, the orbital motions of binary stars by William Herschel in the 19th century, the accurate measurement of the stellar parallax in the 19th century, and Newtonian mechanics in the 17th century.[55][56] According to physicist Christopher Graney, Galileo's own observations did not actually support the Copernican view, but were more consistent with Tycho Brahe's hybrid model where that Earth did not move and everything else circled around it and the Sun.[57]

A modern view, described by Stephen Jay Gould as "non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA), is that science and religion deal with fundamentally separate aspects of human experience and so, when each stays within its own domain, they co-exist peacefully.[58] While Gould spoke of independence from the perspective of science, W. T. Stace viewed independence from the perspective of the philosophy of religion. Stace felt that science and religion, when each is viewed in its own domain, are both consistent and complete.[59]

Science and religion are based on different aspects of human experience; in science, explanations must be based on evidence drawn from examining the natural world. Scientifically based observations or experiments that conflict with an explanation eventually must lead to modification or even abandonment of that explanation. Religious faith, in contrast, does not depend on empirical evidence, is not necessarily modified in the face of conflicting evidence, and typically involves supernatural forces or entities, because they are not a part of nature, supernatural entities cannot be investigated by science. In this sense, science and religion are separate and address aspects of human understanding in different ways. Attempts to put science and religion against each other create controversy where none needs to exist.[60]

According to Archbishop John Habgood, both science and religion represent distinct ways of approaching experience and these differences are sources of debate, he views science as descriptive and religion as prescriptive. He stated that if science and mathematics concentrate on what the world ought to be, in the way that religion does, it may lead to improperly ascribing properties to the natural world as happened among the followers of Pythagoras in the sixth century B.C.[61] In contrast, proponents of a normative moral science take issue with the idea that science has no way of guiding "oughts". Habgood also stated that he believed that the reverse situation, where religion attempts to be descriptive, can also lead to inappropriately assigning properties to the natural world. A notable example is the now defunct belief in the Ptolemaic (geocentric) planetary model that held sway until changes in scientific and religious thinking were brought about by Galileo and proponents of his views.[61]

Michael Polanyi asserted that it is merely a commitment to universality that protects against subjectivity and has nothing at all to do with personal detachment as found in many conceptions of the scientific method. Polanyi further asserted that all knowledge is personal and therefore the scientist must be performing a very personal if not necessarily subjective role when doing science.[62] Polanyi added that the scientist often merely follows intuitions of "intellectual beauty, symmetry, and 'empirical agreement'".[62] Polanyi held that science requires moral commitments similar to those found in religion.[62]

Two physicists, Charles A. Coulson and Harold K. Schilling, both claimed that "the methods of science and religion have much in common."[62] Schilling asserted that both fields—science and religion—have "a threefold structure—of experience, theoretical interpretation, and practical application."[62] Coulson asserted that science, like religion, "advances by creative imagination" and not by "mere collecting of facts," while stating that religion should and does "involve critical reflection on experience not unlike that which goes on in science."[62] Religious language and scientific language also show parallels (cf. rhetoric of science).

The religion and science community consists of those scholars who involve themselves with what has been called the "religion-and-science dialogue" or the "religion-and-science field."[63][64] The community belongs to neither the scientific nor the religious community, but is said to be a third overlapping community of interested and involved scientists, priests, clergymen, theologians and engaged non-professionals.[64][not in citation given] Institutions interested in the intersection between science and religion include the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science, the Ian Ramsey Centre,[65] and the Faraday Institute. Journals addressing the relationship between science and religion include Theology and Science and Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science. Eugenie Scott has written that the "science and religion" movement is, overall, composed mainly of theists who have a healthy respect for science and may be beneficial to the public understanding of science. She contends that the "Christian scholarship" movement is not a problem for science, but that the "Theistic science" movement, which proposes abandoning methodological materialism, does cause problems in understanding of the nature of science.[66]

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga has argued that there is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and religion, and that there is deep conflict between science and naturalism.[71] Plantinga, in his book Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, heavily contests the linkage of naturalism with science, as conceived by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and like-minded thinkers; while Daniel Dennett thinks that Plantinga stretches science to an unacceptable extent.[72] Philosopher Maarten Boudry, in reviewing the book, has commented that he resorts to creationism and fails to "stave off the conflict between theism and evolution."[73] Cognitive scientist Justin L. Barrett, by contrast, reviews the same book and writes that "those most needing to hear Plantinga's message may fail to give it a fair hearing for rhetorical rather than analytical reasons."[74]

As a general view, this holds that while interactions are complex between influences of science, theology, politics, social, and economic concerns, the productive engagements between science and religion throughout history should be duly stressed as the norm.

Scientific and theological perspectives often coexist peacefully. Christians and some non-Christian religions have historically integrated well with scientific ideas, as in the ancient Egyptian technological mastery applied to monotheistic ends, the flourishing of logic and mathematics under Hinduism and Buddhism, and the scientific advances made by Muslim scholars during the Ottoman empire. Even many 19th-century Christian communities welcomed scientists who claimed that science was not at all concerned with discovering the ultimate nature of reality.[61] According to Lawrence M. Principe, the Johns Hopkins University Drew Professor of the Humanities, from a historical perspective this points out that much of the current-day clashes occur between limited extremists—both religious and scientistic fundamentalists—over a very few topics, and that the movement of ideas back and forth between scientific and theological thought has been more usual.[75] To Principe, this perspective would point to the fundamentally common respect for written learning in religious traditions of rabbinical literature, Christian theology, and the Islamic Golden Age, including a Transmission of the Classics from Greek to Islamic to Christian traditions which helped spark the Renaissance. Religions have also given key participation in development of modern universities and libraries; centers of learning & scholarship were coincident with religious institutions – whether pagan, Muslim, or Christian.[76]

A fundamental principle of the Bahá'í Faith is the harmony of religion and science. Bahá'í scripture asserts that true science and true religion can never be in conflict. `Abdu'l-Bahá, the son of the founder of the religion, stated that religion without science is superstition and that science without religion is materialism. He also admonished that true religion must conform to the conclusions of science.[77][78][79]

Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, maintains that empirical scientific evidence supersedes the traditional teachings of Buddhism when the two are in conflict. In his book The Universe in a Single Atom he wrote, "My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science, so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation." and "If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false," he says, "then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims."[82][83][page needed]

Science and Religion are portrayed to be in harmony in the Tiffany window Education (1890).

Most sources of knowledge available to early Christians were connected to pagan world-views.[citation needed] There were various opinions on how Christianity should regard pagan learning, which included its ideas about nature.[citation needed] For instance, among early Christian teachers, Tertullian (c. 160–220) held a generally negative opinion of Greek philosophy, while Origen (c. 185–254) regarded it much more favorably and required his students to read nearly every work available to them.[84]

Christian philosophersAugustine of Hippo (354–30) and Thomas Aquinas[87] held that scriptures can have multiple interpretations on certain areas where the matters were far beyond their reach, therefore one should leave room for future findings to shed light on the meanings. The "Handmaiden" tradition, which saw secular studies of the universe as a very important and helpful part of arriving at a better understanding of scripture, was adopted throughout Christian history from early on.[88] Also the sense that God created the world as a self operating system is what motivated many Christians throughout the Middle Ages to investigate nature.[89]

Modern historians of science such as J.L. Heilbron,[90]Alistair Cameron Crombie, David Lindberg,[91]Edward Grant, Thomas Goldstein,[92] and Ted Davis have reviewed the popular notion that medieval Christianity was a negative influence in the development of civilization and science. In their views, not only did the monks save and cultivate the remnants of ancient civilization during the barbarian invasions, but the medieval church promoted learning and science through its sponsorship of many universities which, under its leadership, grew rapidly in Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries, St. Thomas Aquinas, the Church's "model theologian", not only argued that reason is in harmony with faith, he even recognized that reason can contribute to understanding revelation, and so encouraged intellectual development, he was not unlike other medieval theologians who sought out reason in the effort to defend his faith.[93] Some of today's scholars, such as Stanley Jaki, have claimed that Christianity with its particular worldview, was a crucial factor for the emergence of modern science.[94]

David C. Lindberg states that the widespread popular belief that the Middle Ages was a time of ignorance and superstition due to the Christian church is a "caricature". According to Lindberg, while there are some portions of the classical tradition which suggest this view, these were exceptional cases, it was common to tolerate and encourage critical thinking about the nature of the world. The relation between Christianity and science is complex and cannot be simplified to either harmony or conflict, according to Lindberg.[95] Lindberg reports that "the late medieval scholar rarely experienced the coercive power of the church and would have regarded himself as free (particularly in the natural sciences) to follow reason and observation wherever they led. There was no warfare between science and the church."[96]Ted Peters in Encyclopedia of Religion writes that although there is some truth in the "Galileo's condemnation" story but through exaggerations, it has now become "a modern myth perpetuated by those wishing to see warfare between science and religion who were allegedly persecuted by an atavistic and dogma-bound ecclesiastical authority".[97] In 1992, the Catholic Church's seeming vindication of Galileo attracted much comment in the media.

A degree of concord between science and religion can be seen in religious belief and empirical science, the belief that God created the world and therefore humans, can lead to the view that he arranged for humans to know the world. This is underwritten by the doctrine of imago dei; in the words of Thomas Aquinas, "Since human beings are said to be in the image of God in virtue of their having a nature that includes an intellect, such a nature is most in the image of God in virtue of being most able to imitate God".[98]

During the Enlightenment, a period "characterized by dramatic revolutions in science" and the rise of Protestant challenges to the authority of the Catholic Church via individual liberty, the authority of Christian scriptures became strongly challenged, as science advanced, acceptance of a literal version of the Bible became "increasingly untenable" and some in that period presented ways of interpreting scripture according to its spirit on its authority and truth.[99]

Most scientists have rejected creation science for several reasons, including that its claims do not refer to natural causes and cannot be tested; in 1987, the United States Supreme Court ruled that creationism is religion, not science, and cannot be advocated in public school classrooms.[108]

Theistic evolution attempts to reconcile Christian beliefs and science by accepting the scientific understanding of the age of the Earth and the process of evolution. It includes a range of beliefs, including views described as evolutionary creationism, which accepts some findings of modern science but also upholds classical religious teachings about God and creation in Christian context.[109]

In Reconciling Science and Religion: The Debate in Early-twentieth-century Britain, historian of biology Peter J. Bowler argues that in contrast to the conflicts between science and religion in the U.S. in the 1920s (most famously the Scopes Trial), during this period Great Britain experienced a concerted effort at reconciliation, championed by intellectually conservative scientists, supported by liberal theologians but opposed by younger scientists and secularists and conservative Christians. These attempts at reconciliation fell apart in the 1930s due to increased social tensions, moves towards neo-orthodox theology and the acceptance of the modern evolutionary synthesis.[110]

While refined and clarified over the centuries, the Roman Catholic position on the relationship between science and religion is one of harmony, and has maintained the teaching of natural law as set forth by Thomas Aquinas. For example, regarding scientific study such as that of evolution, the church's unofficial position is an example of theistic evolution, stating that faith and scientific findings regarding human evolution are not in conflict, though humans are regarded as a special creation, and that the existence of God is required to explain both monogenism and the spiritual component of human origins. Catholic schools have included all manners of scientific study in their curriculum for many centuries.[112]

Galileo once stated "The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."[113] In 1981 John Paul II, then pope of the Roman Catholic Church, spoke of the relationship this way: "The Bible itself speaks to us of the origin of the universe and its make-up, not in order to provide us with a scientific treatise, but in order to state the correct relationships of man with God and with the universe. Sacred Scripture wishes simply to declare that the world was created by God, and in order to teach this truth it expresses itself in the terms of the cosmology in use at the time of the writer".[114]

According to Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom from the 19th century, a biblical world view affected negatively the progress of science through time. Dickinson also argues that immediately following the Reformation matters were even worse, the interpretations of Scripture by Luther and Calvin became as sacred to their followers as the Scripture itself. For instance, when Georg Calixtus ventured, in interpreting the Psalms, to question the accepted belief that "the waters above the heavens" were contained in a vast receptacle upheld by a solid vault, he was bitterly denounced as heretical.[115] Today, much of the scholarship in which the conflict thesis was originally based is considered to be inaccurate, for instance, the claim that early Christians rejected scientific findings by the Greco-Romans is false, since the "handmaiden" view of secular studies was seen to shed light on theology. This view was widely adapted throughout the early medieval period and afterwards by theologians (such as Augustine) and ultimately resulted in fostering interest in knowledge about nature through time.[116] Also, the claim that people of the Middle Ages widely believed that the Earth was flat was first propagated in the same period that originated the conflict thesis[117] and is still very common in popular culture. Modern scholars regard this claim as mistaken, as the contemporary historians of science David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers write: "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference."[117][118] From the fall of Rome to the time of Columbus, all major scholars and many vernacular writers interested in the physical shape of the earth held a spherical view with the exception of Lactantius and Cosmas.[119]

H. Floris Cohen argued for a biblical Protestant, but not excluding Catholicism, influence on the early development of modern science.[120] He presented Dutch historian R. Hooykaas' argument that a biblical world-view holds all the necessary antidotes for the hubris of Greek rationalism: a respect for manual labour, leading to more experimentation and empiricism, and a supreme God that left nature open to emulation and manipulation.[120] It supports the idea early modern science rose due to a combination of Greek and biblical thought.[121][122]

Oxford historian Peter Harrison is another who has argued that a biblical worldview was significant for the development of modern science. Harrison contends that Protestant approaches to the book of scripture had significant, if largely unintended, consequences for the interpretation of the book of nature.[123][page needed] Harrison has also suggested that literal readings of the Genesis narratives of the Creation and Fall motivated and legitimated scientific activity in seventeenth-century England, for many of its seventeenth-century practitioners, science was imagined to be a means of restoring a human dominion over nature that had been lost as a consequence of the Fall.[124][page needed]

Historian and professor of religion Eugene M. Klaaren holds that "a belief in divine creation" was central to an emergence of science in seventeenth-century England. The philosopher Michael Foster has published analytical philosophy connecting Christian doctrines of creation with empiricism. Historian William B. Ashworth has argued against the historical notion of distinctive mind-sets and the idea of Catholic and Protestant sciences.[125] Historians James R. Jacob and Margaret C. Jacob have argued for a linkage between seventeenth century Anglican intellectual transformations and influential English scientists (e.g., Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton).[126]John Dillenberger and Christopher B. Kaiser have written theological surveys, which also cover additional interactions occurring in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.[127][128] Philosopher of Religion, Richard Jones, has written a philosophical critique of the "dependency thesis" which assumes that modern science emerged from Christian sources and doctrines. Though he acknowledges that modern science emerged in a religious framework, that Christianity greatly elevated the importance of science by sanctioning and religiously legitimizing it in the medieval period, and that Christianity created a favorable social context for it to grow; he argues that direct Christian beliefs or doctrines were not primary sources of scientific pursuits by natural philosophers, nor was Christianity, in and of itself, exclusively or directly necessary in developing or practicing modern science.[50]

Oxford University historian and theologian John Hedley Brooke wrote that "when natural philosophers referred to laws of nature, they were not glibly choosing that metaphor. Laws were the result of legislation by an intelligent deity, thus the philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) insisted that he was discovering the "laws that God has put into nature." Later Newton would declare that the regulation of the solar system presupposed the "counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being."[129] Historian Ronald L. Numbers stated that this thesis "received a boost" from mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead's Science and the Modern World (1925). Numbers has also argued, "Despite the manifest shortcomings of the claim that Christianity gave birth to science—most glaringly, it ignores or minimizes the contributions of ancient Greeks and medieval Muslims—it too, refuses to succumb to the death it deserves."[130] The sociologist Rodney Stark of Baylor University, argued in contrast that "Christian theology was essential for the rise of science."[131]

Protestantism had an important influence on science. According to the Merton Thesis there was a positive correlation between the rise of Puritanism and ProtestantPietism on the one hand and early experimental science on the other.[132] The Merton Thesis has two separate parts: Firstly, it presents a theory that science changes due to an accumulation of observations and improvement in experimental techniques and methodology; secondly, it puts forward the argument that the popularity of science in 17th-century England and the religious demography of the Royal Society (English scientists of that time were predominantly Puritans or other Protestants) can be explained by a correlation between Protestantism and the scientific values.[133] In his theory, Robert K. Merton focused on English Puritanism and German Pietism as having been responsible for the development of the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries. Merton explained that the connection between religious affiliation and interest in science was the result of a significant synergy between the ascetic Protestant values and those of modern science.[134] Protestant values encouraged scientific research by allowing science to study God's influence on the world and thus providing a religious justification for scientific research.[132]

The historical process of Confucianism has largely been antipathic towards scientific discovery, however the religio-philosophical system itself is more neutral on the subject than such an analysis might suggest. In his writings On Heaven, Xunzi espoused a proto-scientific world view.[135] However, during the Han Synthesis the more anti-empirical Mencius was favored and combined with Daoist skepticism regarding the nature of reality. Likewise, during the Medieval period, Zhu Xi argued against technical investigation and specialization proposed by Chen Liang,[136] after contact with the West, scholars such as Wang Fuzhi would rely on Buddhist/Daoist skepticism to denounce all science as a subjective pursuit limited by humanity's fundamental ignorance of the true nature of the world.[137] After the May Fourth Movement, attempts to modernize Confucianism and reconcile it with scientific understanding were attempted by many scholars including Feng Youlan and Xiong Shili. Given the close relationship that Confucianism shares with Buddhism, many of the same arguments used to reconcile Buddhism with science also readily translate to Confucianism. However, modern scholars have also attempted to define the relationship between science and Confucianism on Confucianism's own terms and the results have usually led to the conclusion that Confucianism and science are fundamentally compatible.[138]

In Hinduism, the dividing line between objective sciences and spiritual knowledge (adhyatma vidya) is a linguistic paradox.[139] Hindu scholastic activities and ancient Indian scientific advancements were so interconnected that many Hindu scriptures are also ancient scientific manuals and vice versa; in 1835, English was made the primary language for teaching in higher education in India, exposing Hindu scholars to Western secular ideas; this started a renaissance regarding religious and philosophical thought.[140] Hindu sages maintained that logical argument and rational proof using Nyaya is the way to obtain correct knowledge,[139] the scientific level of understanding focuses on how things work and from where they originate, while Hinduism strives to understand the ultimate purposes for the existence of living things.[140] To obtain and broaden the knowledge of the world for spiritual perfection, many refer to the Bhāgavata for guidance because it draws upon a scientific and theological dialogue.[141] Hinduism offers methods to correct and transform itself in course of time, for instance, Hindu views on the development of life include a range of viewpoints in regards to evolution, creationism, and the origin of life within the traditions of Hinduism. For instance, it has been suggested that Wallace-Darwininan evolutionary thought was a part of Hindu thought centuries before modern times,[142] the Shankara and the Sāmkhya did not have a problem with the theory of evolution, but instead, argued about the existence of God and what happened after death. These two distinct groups argued among each other's philosophies because of their sacred texts, not the idea of evolution,[143] with the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, many Hindus were eager to connect their scriptures to Darwinism, finding similarities between Brahma's creation, Vishnu's incarnations, and evolution theories.[140]

Samkhya, the oldest school of Hindu philosophy prescribes a particular method to analyze knowledge. According to Samkhya, all knowledge is possible through three means of valid knowledge[144][145] –

Nyaya, the Hindu school of logic, accepts all these 3 means and in addition accepts one more – Upamāna (comparison).

The accounts of the emergence of life within the universe vary in description, but classically the deity called Brahma, from a Trimurti of three deities also including Vishnu and Shiva, is described as performing the act of 'creation', or more specifically of 'propagating life within the universe' with the other two deities being responsible for 'preservation' and 'destruction' (of the universe) respectively.[146] In this respect some Hindu schools do not treat the scriptural creation myth literally and often the creation stories themselves do not go into specific detail, thus leaving open the possibility of incorporating at least some theories in support of evolution, some Hindus find support for, or foreshadowing of evolutionary ideas in scriptures, namely the Vedas.[147]

As per Vedas, another explanation for the creation is based on the five elements: earth, water, fire, air and aether, the Hindu religion traces its beginnings to the sacred Vedas. Everything that is established in the Hindu faith such as the gods and goddesses, doctrines, chants, spiritual insights, etc. flow from the poetry of Vedic hymns. The Vedas offer an honor to the sun and moon, water and wind, and to the order in Nature that is universal, this naturalism is the beginning of what further becomes the connection between Hinduism and science.[154]

From an Islamic standpoint, science, the study of nature, is considered to be linked to the concept of Tawhid (the Oneness of God), as are all other branches of knowledge;[155] in Islam, nature is not seen as a separate entity, but rather as an integral part of Islam's holistic outlook on God, humanity, and the world. The Islamic view of science and nature is continuous with that of religion and God, this link implies a sacred aspect to the pursuit of scientific knowledge by Muslims, as nature itself is viewed in the Qur'an as a compilation of signs pointing to the Divine.[156] It was with this understanding that science was studied and understood in Islamic civilizations, specifically during the eighth to sixteenth centuries, prior to the colonization of the Muslim world.[157]Robert Briffault, in The Making of Humanity, asserts that the very existence of science, as it is understood in the modern sense, is rooted in the scientific thought and knowledge that emerged in Islamic civilizations during this time.[158]Ibn al-Haytham, an Arab[159]Muslim,[160][161][162] was an early proponent of the concept that a hypothesis must be proved by experiments based on confirmable procedures or mathematicalevidence—hence understanding the scientific method 200 years before Renaissance scientists.[163][2][164][165][166] Ibn al-Haytham described his theology:

I constantly sought knowledge and truth, and it became my belief that for gaining access to the effulgence and closeness to God, there is no better way than that of searching for truth and knowledge.[167]

With the decline of Islamic Civilizations in the late Middle Ages and the rise of Europe, the Islamic scientific tradition shifted into a new period. Institutions that had existed for centuries in the Muslim world looked to the new scientific institutions of European powers.[citation needed] This changed the practice of science in the Muslim world, as Islamic scientists had to confront the western approach to scientific learning, which was based on a different philosophy of nature,[155] from the time of this initial upheaval of the Islamic scientific tradition to the present day, Muslim scientists and scholars have developed a spectrum of viewpoints on the place of scientific learning within the context of Islam, none of which are universally accepted or practiced.[168] However, most maintain the view that the acquisition of knowledge and scientific pursuit in general is not in disaccord with Islamic thought and religious belief.[155][168]

The Ahmadiyya movement emphasize that there is no contradiction between Islam and science.[citation needed] For example, Ahmadi Muslims universally accept in principle the process of evolution, albeit divinely guided, and actively promote it, over the course of several decades the movement has issued various publications in support of the scientific concepts behind the process of evolution, and frequently engages in promoting how religious scriptures, such as the Qur'an, supports the concept.[169] For general purposes, the second Khalifa of the community, Mirza Basheer-ud-Din Mahmood Ahmad says:

The Holy Quran directs attention towards science, time and again, rather than evoking prejudice against it, the Quran has never advised against studying science, lest the reader should become a non-believer; because it has no such fear or concern. The Holy Quran is not worried that if people will learn the laws of nature its spell will break, the Quran has not prevented people from science, rather it states, "Say, 'Reflect on what is happening in the heavens and the earth.'" (Al Younus)[170]

The Jain theory of causation holds that a cause and its effect are always identical in nature and hence a conscious and immaterial entity like God cannot create a material entity like the universe. Furthermore, according to the Jain concept of divinity, any soul who destroys its karmas and desires, achieves liberation. A soul who destroys all its passions and desires has no desire to interfere in the working of the universe. Moral rewards and sufferings are not the work of a divine being, but a result of an innate moral order in the cosmos; a self-regulating mechanism whereby the individual reaps the fruits of his own actions through the workings of the karmas.

Through the ages, Jain philosophers have adamantly rejected and opposed the concept of creator and omnipotent God and this has resulted in Jainism being labeled as nastika darsana or atheist philosophy by the rival religious philosophies. The theme of non-creationism and absence of omnipotent God and divine grace runs strongly in all the philosophical dimensions of Jainism, including its cosmology, karma, moksa and its moral code of conduct. Jainism asserts a religious and virtuous life is possible without the idea of a creator god.[172]

In the 17th century, founders of the Royal Society largely held conventional and orthodox religious views, and a number of them were prominent Churchmen.[173] While theological issues that had the potential to be divisive were typically excluded from formal discussions of the early Society, many of its fellows nonetheless believed that their scientific activities provided support for traditional religious belief.[174] Clerical involvement in the Royal Society remained high until the mid-nineteenth century, when science became more professionalised.[175]

Albert Einstein supported the compatibility of some interpretations of religion with science. In "Science, Philosophy and Religion, A Symposium" published by the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., New York in 1941, Einstein stated:

Accordingly, a religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt of the significance and loftiness of those superpersonal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation, they exist with the same necessity and matter-of-factness as he himself. In this sense religion is the age-old endeavor of mankind to become clearly and completely conscious of these values and goals and constantly to strengthen and extend their effect. If one conceives of religion and science according to these definitions then a conflict between them appears impossible, for science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary. Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of human thought and action: it cannot justifiably speak of facts and relationships between facts. According to this interpretation the well-known conflicts between religion and science in the past must all be ascribed to a misapprehension of the situation which has been described.[176]

In 1916, 1,000 leading American scientists were randomly chosen from American Men of Science and 42% believed God existed, 42% disbelieved, and 17% had doubts/did not know; however when the study was replicated 80 years later using American Men and Women of Science in 1996, results were very much the same with 39% believing God exists, 45% disbelieved, and 15% had doubts/did not know.[69][178] In the same 1996 survey, scientists in the fields of biology, mathematics, and physics/astronomy, belief in a god that is "in intellectual and affective communication with humankind" was most popular among mathematicians (about 45%) and least popular among physicists (about 22%). In total, in terms of belief toward a personal god and personal immortality, about 60% of United States scientists in these fields expressed either disbelief or agnosticism and about 40% expressed belief,[178] this compared with 62.9% in 1914 and 33% in 1933.[179]

A survey conducted between 2005 and 2007 by Elaine Howard Ecklund of University at Buffalo, The State University of New York of 1,646 natural and social science professors at 21 US research universities found that, in terms of belief in God or a higher power, more than 60% expressed either disbelief or agnosticism and more than 30% expressed belief. More specifically, nearly 34% answered "I do not believe in God" and about 30% answered "I do not know if there is a God and there is no way to find out."[180] In the same study, 28% said they believed in God and 8% believed in a higher power that was not God.[181] Ecklund stated that scientists were often able to consider themselves spiritual without religion or belief in god.[182] Ecklund and Scheitle concluded, from their study, that the individuals from non-religious backgrounds disproportionately had self-selected into scientific professions and that the assumption that becoming a scientist necessarily leads to loss of religion is untenable since the study did not strongly support the idea that scientists had dropped religious identities due to their scientific training.[183] Instead, factors such as upbringing, age, and family size were significant influences on religious identification since those who had religious upbringing were more likely to be religious and those who had a non-religious upbringing were more likely to not be religious.[180][183][184] The authors also found little difference in religiosity between social and natural scientists.[184]

Since 1901–2013, 22% of all Nobel prizes have been awarded to Jews despite them being less than 1% of the world population.[185]

Between 1901 and 2000, 654 Laureates belonged to 28 different religions. Most (65%) have identified Christianity in its various forms as their religious preference. Specifically on the science related prizes, Christians have won a total of 73% of all the Chemistry, 65% in Physics, 62% in Medicine, and 54% in all Economics awards.[177]Jews have won 17% of the prizes in Chemistry, 26% in Medicine, and 23% in Physics.[177] Atheists, Agnostics, and Freethinkers have won 7% of the prizes in Chemistry, 9% in Medicine, and 5% in Physics.[177]Muslims have won 13 prizes (three were in scientific category).

Many studies have been conducted in the United States and have generally found that scientists are less likely to believe in God than are the rest of the population. Precise definitions and statistics vary, with some studies concluding that about ​1⁄3 of scientists in the U.S. ​1⁄3 are atheists, ​1⁄3 agnostic, and ​1⁄3 have some belief in God (although some might be deistic, for example).[69][178][186] This is in contrast to the more than roughly ​3⁄4 of the general population that believe in some God in the United States. Other studies on scientific organizations like the AAAS show that 51% of their scientists believe in either God or a higher power and 48% having no religion.[187] Belief also varies slightly by field. Two surveys on physicists, geoscientists, biologists, mathematicians, and chemists have noted that, from those specializing in these fields, physicists had lowest percentage of belief in God (29%) while chemists had highest (41%).[178][188] Other studies show that among members of the National Academy of Sciences, concerning the existence of a personal god who answers prayer, 7% expressed belief, 72% expressed disbelief, and 21% were agnostic,[189] however Eugenie Scott argued that there are methodological issues in the study, including ambiguity in the questions. A study with simplified wording to include impersonal or non-interventionist ideas of God concluded that 40% of leading scientists in the US scientists believe in a god.[190]

In terms of perceptions, most social and natural scientists from 21 American universities did not perceive conflict between science and religion, while 37% did. However, in the study, scientists who had experienced limited exposure to religion tended to perceive conflict;[44] in the same study they found that nearly one in five atheist scientists who are parents (17%) are part of religious congregations and have attended a religious service more than once in the past year. Some of the reasons for doing so are their scientific identity (wishing to expose their children to all sources of knowledge so they can make up their own minds), spousal influence, and desire for community.[191]

A 2009 report by the Pew Research Center found that members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) were "much less religious than the general public," with 51% believing in some form of deity or higher power. Specifically, 33% of those polled believe in God, 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power, and 41% did not believe in either God or a higher power.[192] 48% say they have a religious affiliation, equal to the number who say they are not affiliated with any religious tradition. 17% were atheists, 11% were agnostics, 20% were nothing in particular, 8% were Jewish, 10% were Catholic, 16% were Protestant, 4% were Evangelical, 10% were other religion. The survey also found younger scientists to be "substantially more likely than their older counterparts to say they believe in God", among the surveyed fields, chemists were the most likely to say they believe in God.[188]

Elaine Ecklund conducted a study from 2011 to 2014 involving the general US population, including rank and file scientists, in collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The study noted that 76% of the scientists identified with a religious tradition. 85% of evangelical scientists had no doubts about the existence of God, compared to 35% of the whole scientific population. In terms of religion and science, 85% of evangelical scientists saw no conflict (73% collaboration, 12% independence), while 75% of the whole scientific population saw no conflict (40% collaboration, 35% independence).[193]

Religious beliefs of US professors were examined using a nationally representative sample of more than 1,400 professors, they found that in the social sciences: 23% did not believe in God, 16% did not know if God existed, 43% believed God existed, and 16% believed in a higher power. Out of the natural sciences: 20% did not believe in God, 33% did not know if God existed, 44% believed God existed, and 4% believed in a higher power. Overall, out of the whole study: 10% were atheists, 13% were agnostic, 19% believe in a higher power, 4% believe in God some of the time, 17% had doubts but believed in God, 35% believed in God and had no doubts.[194]

Farr Curlin, a University of Chicago Instructor in Medicine and a member of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, noted in a study that doctors tend to be science-minded religious people. He helped author a study that "found that 76 percent of doctors believe in God and 59 percent believe in some sort of afterlife." and "90 percent of doctors in the United States attend religious services at least occasionally, compared to 81 percent of all adults." He reasoned, "The responsibility to care for those who are suffering and the rewards of helping those in need resonate throughout most religious traditions."[195]

Physicians in the United States, by contrast, are much more religious than scientists, with 76% stating a belief in God.[195]

According to the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture's report on 1,100 scientists in India: 66% are Hindu, 14% did not report a religion, 10% are atheist/no religion, 3% are Muslim, 3% are Christian, 4% are Buddhist, Sikh or other.[196] 39% have a belief in a god, 6% have belief in a god sometimes, 30% do not believe in a god but believe in a higher power, 13% do not know if there is a god, and 12% do not believe in a god.[196] 49% believe in the efficacy of prayer, 90% strongly agree or somewhat agree with approving degrees in Ayurvedic medicine. Furthermore, the term "secularism" is understood to have diverse and simultaneous meanings among Indian scientists: 93% believe it to be tolerance of religions and philosophies, 83% see it as involving separation of church and state, 53% see it as not identifying with religious traditions, 40% see it as absence of religious beliefs, and 20% see it as atheism. Accordingly, 75% of Indian scientists had a "secular" outlook in terms of being tolerant of other religions.[196]

According to the Religion Among Scientists in International Context (RASIC) study on 1,581 scientists from the United Kingdom and 1,763 scientists from India, along with 200 interviews: 65% of U.K. scientists identified as nonreligious and only 6% of Indian scientists identify as nonreligious, 12% of scientists in the U.K. attend religious services on a regular basis and 32% of scientists in India do.[197] In terms of the Indian scientists, 73% of scientists responded that there are basic truths in many religions, 27% said they believe in God and 38% expressed belief in a higher power of some kind;[197] in terms of perceptions of conflict between science and religion, less than half of both U.K. scientists (38%) and Indian scientists (18%) perceived conflict between religion and science.[197]

According to Renny Thomas' study on Indian scientists, atheistic scientists in India called themselves atheists even while accepting that their lifestyle is very much a part of tradition and religion. Thus, they differ from Western atheists in that for them following the lifestyle of a religion is not antithetical to atheism.[198]

Over time, scientists and historians have moved away from the conflict thesis and toward compatibility theses (either the integration thesis or non-overlapping magisteria). Many experts have now adopted a "complexity thesis" that combines several other models,[199] further at the expense of the conflict thesis.

Global studies which have pooled data on religion and science from 1981–2001, have noted that countries with high religiosity also have stronger faith in science, while less religious countries have more skepticism of the impact of science and technology,[200] the United States is noted there as distinctive because of greater faith in both God and scientific progress. Other research cites the National Science Foundation's finding that America has more favorable public attitudes towards science than Europe, Russia, and Japan despite differences in levels of religiosity in these cultures.[201]

A study conducted on adolescents from Christian schools in Northern Ireland, noted a positive relationship between attitudes towards Christianity and science once attitudes towards scientism and creationism were accounted for.[202]

A study on people from Sweden concludes that though the Swedes are among the most non-religious, paranormal beliefs are prevalent among both the young and adult populations, this is likely due to a loss of confidence in institutions such as the Church and Science.[203]

Concerning specific topics like creationism, it is not an exclusively American phenomenon. A poll on adult Europeans revealed that 40% believed in naturalistic evolution, 21% in theistic evolution, 20% in special creation, and 19% are undecided; with the highest concentrations of young earth creationists in Switzerland (21%), Austria (20%), Germany (18%).[204] Other countries such as Netherlands, Britain, and Australia have experienced growth in such views as well.[204]

According to a 2015 Pew Research Center Study on the public perceptions on science, people's perceptions on conflict with science have more to do with their perceptions of other people's beliefs than their own personal beliefs, for instance, the majority of people with a religious affiliation (68%) saw no conflict between their own personal religious beliefs and science while the majority of those without a religious affiliation (76%) perceived science and religion to be in conflict.[205] The study noted that people who are not affiliated with any religion, also known as "religiously unaffiliated", often have supernatural beliefs and spiritual practices despite them not being affiliated with any religion[205][206][207] and also that "just one-in-six religiously unaffiliated adults (16%) say their own religious beliefs conflict with science."[205] Furthermore, the study observed, "The share of all adults who perceive a conflict between science and their own religious beliefs has declined somewhat in recent years, from 36% in 2009 to 30% in 2014, among those who are affiliated with a religion, the share of people who say there is a conflict between science and their personal religious beliefs dropped from 41% to 34% during this period."[205]

The 2013 MIT Survey on Science, Religion and Origins examined the views of religious people in America on origins science topics like evolution, the Big Bang, and perceptions of conflicts between science and religion, it found that a large majority of religious people see no conflict between science and religion and only 11% of religious people belong to religions openly rejecting evolution. The fact that the gap between personal and official beliefs of their religions is so large suggests that part of the problem, might be defused by people learning more about their own religious doctrine and the science it endorses, thereby bridging this belief gap, the study concluded that "mainstream religion and mainstream science are neither attacking one another nor perceiving a conflict." Furthermore, they note that this conciliatory view is shared by most leading science organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).[208]

A study collecting data from 2011 to 2014 on the general public, with focus on evangelicals and evangelical scientists was done in collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Even though evangelicals only make up 26% of the US population, the found that nearly 70 percent of all evangelical Christians do not view science and religion as being in conflict with each other (48% saw them as complementary and 21% saw them as independent) while 73% of the general US population saw no conflict as well.[193][209]

Other lines of research on perceptions of science among the American public conclude that most religious groups see no general epistemological conflict with science and they have no differences with nonreligious groups in the propensity of seeking out scientific knowledge, although there may be subtle epistemic or moral conflicts when scientists make counterclaims to religious tenets.[210][211] Findings from the Pew Center note similar findings and also note that the majority of Americans (80–90%) show strong support for scientific research, agree that science makes society and individual's lives better, and 8 in 10 Americans would be happy if their children were to become scientists.[212] Even strict creationists tend to have very favorable views on science.[201]

According to a 2007 poll by the Pew Forum, "while large majorities of Americans respect science and scientists, they are not always willing to accept scientific findings that squarely contradict their religious beliefs."[213] The Pew Forum states that specific factual disagreements are "not common today", though 40% to 50% of Americans do not accept the evolution of humans and other living things, with the "strongest opposition" coming from evangelical Christians at 65% saying life did not evolve.[213] 51% of the population believes humans and other living things evolved: 26% through natural selection only, 21% somehow guided, 4% don't know.[213] In the U.S., biological evolution is the only concrete example of conflict where a significant portion of the American public denies scientific consensus for religious reasons.[201][213] In terms of advanced industrialized nations, the United States is the most religious.[213]

A 2009 study from the Pew Research Center on Americans perceptions of science, showed a broad consensus that most Americans, including most religious Americans, hold scientific research and scientists themselves in high regard, the study showed that 84% of Americans say they view science as having a mostly positive impact on society. Among those who attend religious services at least once a week, the number is roughly the same at 80%. Furthermore, 70% of U.S. adults think scientists contribute "a lot" to society.[214]

A 2011 study on a national sample of US college students examined whether these students viewed the science / religion relationship as reflecting primarily conflict, collaboration, or independence, the study concluded that the majority of undergraduates in both the natural and social sciences do not see conflict between science and religion. Another finding in the study was that it is more likely for students to move away from a conflict perspective to an independence or collaboration perspective than towards a conflict view.[215]

In the US, people who had no religious affiliation were no more likely than the religious population to have New Age beliefs and practices.[216]

^Stenmark, Mikael (2004). How to Relate Science and Religion: A Multidimensional Model. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co. p. 45. ISBN0-8028-2823-X. Recognizing that science and religion are essentially social practices always performed by people living in certain cultural and historical situations should alert us to the fact that religion and science change over time.

^ abRussel, C.A. (2002). Ferngren, G.B., ed. Science & Religion: A Historical Introduction. Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 7. ISBN0-8018-7038-0. The conflict thesis, at least in its simple form, is now widely perceived as a wholly inadequate intellectual framework within which to construct a sensible and realistic historiography of Western science

^ abShapin, S. (1996). The Scientific Revolution. University of Chicago Press. p. 195. In the late Victorian period it was common to write about the 'warfare between science and religion' and to presume that the two bodies of culture must always have been in conflict. However, it is a very long time since these attitudes have been held by historians of science.

^Committee on Revising Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine of the National Academies (2008). Science, Evolution and Creationism. National Academy of Sciences.

^ abcdefHarrison, Peter (2015). The Territories of Science and Religion. University of Chicago Press. ISBN0-226-18448-X.

^ abNongbri, Brent (2013). Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept. Yale University Press. ISBN0-300-15416-X.

^ abcJosephson, Jason Ananda (2012). The Invention of Religion in Japan. University of Chicago Press. ISBN0-226-41234-2.

^ abcCahan, David, ed. (2003). From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences: Writing the History of Nineteenth-Century Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN0-226-08928-2.

^Haught, John F. (1995). Science and Religion : From Conflict to Conversation. Paulist Prees. p. 9. ISBN0-8091-3606-6. Throughout these pages we shall observe that there are at least four distinct ways in which science and religion can be related to each other: 1) Conflict – the conviction that science and religion are fundamentally irreconcilable; 2) Contrast – the claim that there can be no genuine conflict since religion and science are each responding to radically different questions; 3) Contact – an approach that looks for both dialogue and interaction, and possible "consonance" between science and religion, and especially for ways in which science shapes religious and theological understanding. 4) Confirmation – a somewhat quieter but extremely important perspective that highlights the ways in which, at a very deep level, religion supports and nourishes the entire scientific enterprise.

^Ferngren, G.B. (2002). Ferngren, G.B., ed. Science & Religion: A Historical Introduction. Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. ix, x. ISBN0-8018-7038-0. While some historians had always regarded the Draper-White thesis as oversimplifying and distorting a complex relationship, in the late twentieth century it underwent a more systematic reevaluation. The result is the growing recognition among historians of science that the relationship of religion and science has been much more positive than is sometimes thought. " ; "... while [John Hedley] Brooke's view [of a complexity thesis rather than an historical conflict thesis] has gained widespread acceptance among professional historians of science, the traditional view remains strong elsewhere, not least in the popular mind.

^Quotation from Colin A. Russell in "The Conflict Thesis" the first essay of "Gary Ferngren (editor). Science & Religion: A Historical Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ISBN0-8018-7038-0."
"The conflict thesis, at least in its simple form, is now widely perceived as a wholly inadequate intellectual framework within which to construct a sensible and realistic historiography of Western science." (p. 7, followed by a list of the basic reasons why the conflict thesis is wrong).

^ abJones, Richard H. (2011). For the Glory of God : The Role of Christianity in the Rise and Development of Modern Science Volume 1. University Press of America. pp. 19–22, 139. ISBN978-0-7618-5566-8.

Science, 6 June 1958, 127(3310), pp. 1324–27; "A Human Enterprise: Science as lived by its practitioners bears but little resemblance to science as described in print." doi:10.1126/science.127.3310.1324

^Boudry, Maarten (September 2012). "Review of Alvin Plantinga (2011), Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism". International History, Philosophy and Science Teaching Group. Plantinga's effort to stave off the conflict between theism and evolution is a failure... if the bar for rational belief is lowered to mere logical possibility, and the demand for positive evidence dropped, then no holds are barred.

^Plavcan, J. Michael (2007). "The Invisible Bible: The Logic of Creation Science". In Petto, Andrew J.; Godfrey, Laurie R. Scientists Confront Creationism. New York, London: Norton. p. 361. ISBN978-0-393-33073-1. Most creationists are simply people who choose to believe that God created the world-either as described in Scripture or through evolution. Creation scientists, by contrast, strive to use legitimate scientific means both to argue against evolutionary theory and to prove the creation account as described in Scripture.

^James C. Peterson (2001). Genetic Turning Points: The Ethics of Human Genetic Intervention. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. As to specifically Christian theists, an example of continue presence would be the American Scientific Affiliation. It currently has about two thousand members, all of whom affirm the Apostles' Creed as part of joining the association, and most of whom hold Ph.D.s in the natural sciences. Their active journal is Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith. Across the Atlantic, the Society of Ordained Scientists and Christians in Science are similar affiliation in Great Britain.

^Lindberg, David (2009). "Myth 1: That the Rise of Christianity was Responsible for the Demise of Ancient Science". In Ronald Numbers. Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion. Harvard University Press. pp. 15–18. ISBN978-0-674-05741-8.

^Cormack, Leslie (2009). "Myth 3: That Medieval Christians Taught that the Earth was Flat". In Ronald Numbers. Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion. Harvard University Press. pp. 28–34. ISBN978-0-674-05741-8.

^Black, Alison Harley. "Man and Nature in the Philosophical Thought of Wang Fu-Chih." Publications on Asia of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, no. 41. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989

^Mary Evelyn Tucker "Confucianism and Ecology: The Interrelation of Heaven, Earth, and Humans (Religions of the World and Ecology)" Center for the Study of World Religions (August 15, 1998)

^Sehgal, Sunil (1999). Encyclopedia of Hinduism (Volume 3). Sarup & Sons. p. 688. The Hindus were Spinozaites more than two thousand years before the existence of Spinoza; and Darwinians many centuries before our time, and before any word like 'evolution' existed in any language of the world.

^Vernet 1996, p. 788: "IBN AL-HAYXHAM, B. AL-HAYTHAM AL-BASRI, AL-MisRl, was identified towards the end of the 19th century with the ALHAZEN, AVENNATHAN and AVENETAN of mediaeval Latin texts, he is one of the principal Arab mathematicians and, without any doubt, the best physicist."

^"Scientists and Belief". Pew Research Center. Retrieved 2011-04-08. A survey of scientists who are members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press in May and June 2009, finds that members of this group are, on the whole, much less religious than the general public.1 Indeed, the survey shows that scientists are roughly half as likely as the general public to believe in God or a higher power. According to the poll, just over half of scientists (51%) believe in some form of deity or higher power; specifically, 33% of scientists say they believe in God, while 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power.

^Thomas, Renny (27 December 2016). "Atheism and Unbelief among Indian Scientists: Towards an Anthropology of Atheism(s)". Society and Culture in South Asia. 3 (1): 45–67. doi:10.1177/2393861716674292.

^Jones, Richard H. (2011). For the Glory of God : The Role of Christianity in the Rise and Development of Modern Science. University Press of America. Pg. 139. ISBN9780761855668.

^Norris, Pippa; Ronald Inglehart (2011). Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 67–68. ISBN978-1-107-64837-1. Instead, as is clearly shown in Figure 3.3, societies with greater faith in science also often have stronger religious beliefs." and "Indeed, the secular postindustrial societies, exemplified by the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, prove most skeptical toward the impact of science and technology, and this is in accordance with the countries where the strongest public disquiet has been expressed about certain contemporary scientific developments such as the use of genetically modified organisms, biotechnological cloning, and nuclear power. Interestingly, again the United States displays distinctive attitudes compared with similar European nations, showing greater faith in both God and scientific progress.

^ abcKeeter, Scott; Smith, Gregory; Masci, David (2011). "Religious Belief and Attitudes about Science in the United States". The Culture of Science: How the Public Relates to Science Across the Globe. New York: Routledge. pp. 336, 345–47. ISBN978-0-415-87369-7. The United States is perhaps the most religious out of the advanced industrial democracies." ; "In fact, large majorities of the traditionally religious American nevertheless hold very positive views of science and scientists. Even people who accept a strict creationist view, regarding the origins of life are mostly favorable towards science." ; "Our review of three important issues on the public policy agenda in the United States suggest that although there is a potential for broad religiously based conflict over science, the scope of this conflict is limited. Only on one issue does a significant portion of the public deny strong consensus for religious reasons: evolution, the significance of this disagreement should not be understated, but it is decidedly unrepresentative of the broader set of scientific controversies and issues. As already noted, it is difficult to find any other major policy issues on which there are strong religious objections to scientific research. Religious concerns do arise in connection with a number of areas of life sciences research, such as the effort to develop medical therapies from embryonic stem cells, but these are not rooted in disputes about the truth of scientific research, and can be found across the spectrum of religious sentiment." ; "According to the National Science Foundation, public attitudes about science are more favorable in the United States than in Europe, Russia, and Japan, despite great differences across these cultures in level of religiosity (National Science Foundation, 2008).

^ abNumbers, Ronald (2009). "Myth 24: That Creationism is a Uniquely American Phenomenon". In Ronald Numbers. Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion. Harvard University Press. pp. 215–23. ISBN978-0-674-05741-8.

INTERS – Interdisciplinary Documentation on Religion and Science – collection of documents (including the Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science) that seeks to help scientists frame their work within a philosophical and humanistic context, edited at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross (Rome, Italy)

1.
Classical antiquity
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It is the period in which Greek and Roman society flourished and wielded great influence throughout Europe, North Africa and Southwestern Asia. Conventionally, it is taken to begin with the earliest-recorded Epic Greek poetry of Homer, and continues through the emergence of Christianity and it ends with the dissolution of classical culture at the close of Late Antiquity, blending into the Early Middle Ages. Such a wide sampling of history and territory covers many disparate cultures, Classical antiquity may refer also to an idealised vision among later people of what was, in Edgar Allan Poes words, the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome. The culture of the ancient Greeks, together with influences from the ancient Near East, was the basis of art, philosophy, society. The earliest period of classical antiquity takes place before the background of gradual re-appearance of historical sources following the Bronze Age collapse, the 8th and 7th centuries BC are still largely proto-historical, with the earliest Greek alphabetic inscriptions appearing in the first half of the 8th century. Homer is usually assumed to have lived in the 8th or 7th century BC, in the same period falls the traditional date for the establishment of the Ancient Olympic Games, in 776 BC. The Phoenicians originally expanded from Canaan ports, by the 8th century dominating trade in the Mediterranean, carthage was founded in 814 BC, and the Carthaginians by 700 BC had firmly established strongholds in Sicily, Italy and Sardinia, which created conflicts of interest with Etruria. The Etruscans had established control in the region by the late 7th century BC, forming the aristocratic. According to legend, Rome was founded on April 21,753 BC by twin descendants of the Trojan prince Aeneas, Romulus and Remus. As the city was bereft of women, legend says that the Latins invited the Sabines to a festival and stole their unmarried maidens, leading to the integration of the Latins and the Sabines. Archaeological evidence indeed shows first traces of settlement at the Roman Forum in the mid-8th century BC, the seventh and final king of Rome was Tarquinius Superbus. As the son of Tarquinius Priscus and the son-in-law of Servius Tullius, Superbus was of Etruscan birth and it was during his reign that the Etruscans reached their apex of power. Superbus removed and destroyed all the Sabine shrines and altars from the Tarpeian Rock, the people came to object to his rule when he failed to recognize the rape of Lucretia, a patrician Roman, at the hands of his own son. Lucretias kinsman, Lucius Junius Brutus, summoned the Senate and had Superbus, after Superbus expulsion, the Senate voted to never again allow the rule of a king and reformed Rome into a republican government in 509 BC. In fact the Latin word Rex meaning King became a dirty and hated throughout the Republic. In 510, Spartan troops helped the Athenians overthrow the tyrant Hippias, cleomenes I, king of Sparta, put in place a pro-Spartan oligarchy conducted by Isagoras. Greece entered the 4th century under Spartan hegemony, but by 395 BC the Spartan rulers removed Lysander from office, and Sparta lost her naval supremacy. Athens, Argos, Thebes and Corinth, the two of which were formerly Spartan allies, challenged Spartan dominance in the Corinthian War, which ended inconclusively in 387 BC

2.
Scientific revolution
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While its dates are debated, the publication in 1543 of Nicolaus Copernicuss De revolutionibus orbium coelestium is often cited as marking the beginning of the scientific revolution. By the end of the 18th century, the revolution had given way to the Age of Reflection. Great advances in science have been termed revolutions since the 18th century, in 1747, Clairaut wrote that Newton was said in his own lifetime to have created a revolution. The word was used in the preface to Lavoisiers 1789 work announcing the discovery of oxygen. Few revolutions in science have immediately excited so much general notice as the introduction of the theory of oxygen, lavoisier saw his theory accepted by all the most eminent men of his time, and established over a great part of Europe within a few years from its first promulgation. In the 19th century, William Whewell described the revolution in science itself -- the scientific method -- that had taken place in the 15th–16th century. This gave rise to the view of the scientific revolution today, A new view of nature emerged. Science became a discipline, distinct from both philosophy and technology and came to be regarded as having utilitarian goals. The scientific revolution is traditionally assumed to start with the Copernican Revolution, in the 20th century, Alexandre Koyré introduced the term scientific revolution, centering his analysis on Galileo. The term was popularized by Butterfield in his Origins of Modern Science, the scientific revolution led to the establishment of several modern sciences. In 1984, Joseph Ben-David wrote, Rapid accumulation of knowledge, the new kind of scientific activity emerged only in a few countries of Western Europe, and it was restricted to that small area for about two hundred years. Many contemporary writers and modern historians claim that there was a change in world view. Looms so large as the origin both of the modern world and of the modern mentality that our customary periodization of European history has become an anachronism. Some scholars have noted a direct tie between particular aspects of traditional Christianity and the rise of science, the Aristotelian tradition was still an important intellectual framework in the 17th century, although by that time natural philosophers had moved away from much of it. Key scientific ideas dating back to classical antiquity had changed drastically over the years, the ideas that remained, which were transformed fundamentally during the scientific revolution, include, Aristotles cosmology that placed the Earth at the center of a spherical hierarchic cosmos. The terrestrial and celestial regions were made up of different elements which had different kinds of natural movement, the terrestrial region, according to Aristotle, consisted of concentric spheres of the four elements—earth, water, air, and fire. All bodies naturally moved in straight lines until they reached the sphere appropriate to their elemental composition—their natural place, all other terrestrial motions were non-natural, or violent. The celestial region was made up of the element, aether

3.
Scientific method
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The scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry is commonly based on empirical or measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning, experiments need to be designed to test hypotheses. The most important part of the method is the experiment. The scientific method is a process, which usually begins with observations about the natural world. Human beings are naturally inquisitive, so often come up with questions about things they see or hear. The best hypotheses lead to predictions that can be tested in various ways, in general, the strongest tests of hypotheses come from carefully controlled and replicated experiments that gather empirical data. Depending on how well the tests match the predictions, the hypothesis may require refinement. If a particular hypothesis becomes very well supported a theory may be developed. Although procedures vary from one field of inquiry to another, identifiable features are shared in common between them. The overall process of the method involves making conjectures, deriving predictions from them as logical consequences. A hypothesis is a conjecture, based on knowledge obtained while formulating the question, the hypothesis might be very specific or it might be broad. Scientists then test hypotheses by conducting experiments, the purpose of an experiment is to determine whether observations agree with or conflict with the predictions derived from a hypothesis. Experiments can take anywhere from a college lab to CERNs Large Hadron Collider. There are difficulties in a statement of method, however. Though the scientific method is presented as a fixed sequence of steps. Not all steps take place in scientific inquiry, and are not always in the same order. Some philosophers and scientists have argued there is no scientific method, such as Lee Smolin. Nola and Sankey remark that For some, the idea of a theory of scientific method is yester-years debate

4.
Islamic Golden Age
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This period is traditionally said to have ended with the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate due to Mongol invasions and the Sack of Baghdad in 1258 AD. A few contemporary scholars place the end of the Islamic Golden Age as late as the end of 15th to 16th centuries, the metaphor of a golden age began to be applied in 19th-century literature about Islamic history, in the context of the western aesthetic fashion known as Orientalism. There is no definition of term, and depending on whether it is used with a focus on cultural or on military achievement. During the early 20th century, the term was used only occasionally, the Muslim government heavily patronized scholars. The money spent on the Translation Movement for some translations is estimated to be equivalent to twice the annual research budget of the United Kingdom’s Medical Research Council. The best scholars and notable translators, such as Hunayn ibn Ishaq, had salaries that are estimated to be the equivalent of professional athletes today, the House of Wisdom was a library established in Abbasid-era Baghdad, Iraq by Caliph al-Mansur. During this period, the Muslims showed a strong interest in assimilating the knowledge of the civilizations that had been conquered. They also excelled in fields, in particular philosophy, science. For a long period of time the personal physicians of the Abbasid Caliphs were often Assyrian Christians, among the most prominent Christian families to serve as physicians to the caliphs were the Bukhtishu dynasty. Throughout the 4th to 7th centuries, Christian scholarly work in the Greek, the House of Wisdom was founded in Baghdad in 825, modelled after the Academy of Gondishapur. It was led by Christian physician Hunayn ibn Ishaq, with the support of Byzantine medicine, many of the most important philosophical and scientific works of the ancient world were translated, including the work of Galen, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy and Archimedes. Many scholars of the House of Wisdom were of Christian background, the use of paper spread from China into Muslim regions in the eighth century, arriving in Al-Andalus on the Iberian peninsula, present-day Spain in the 10th century. It was easier to manufacture than parchment, less likely to crack than papyrus, Islamic paper makers devised assembly-line methods of hand-copying manuscripts to turn out editions far larger than any available in Europe for centuries. It was from countries that the rest of the world learned to make paper from linen. Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina played a role in saving the works of Aristotle, whose ideas came to dominate the non-religious thought of the Christian. Ibn Sina and other such as al-Kindi and al-Farabi combined Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism with other ideas introduced through Islam. Arabic philosophic literature was translated into Latin and Ladino, contributing to the development of modern European philosophy, during this period, non-Muslims were allowed to flourish relative to treatment of religious minorities in the Christian Byzantine Empire. The Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, who lived in Andalusia, is an example, in epistemology, Ibn Tufail wrote the novel Hayy ibn Yaqdhan and in response Ibn al-Nafis wrote the novel Theologus Autodidactus

5.
Ibn al-Haytham
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Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham, also known by the Latinization Alhazen or Alhacen, was an Arab Muslim scientist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher. Ibn al-Haytham made significant contributions to the principles of optics, astronomy, mathematics and he was the first to explain that vision occurs when light bounces on an object and then is directed to ones eyes. He spent most of his close to the court of the Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo and earned his living authoring various treatises. In medieval Europe, Ibn al-Haytham was honored as Ptolemaeus Secundus or simply called The Physicist and he is also sometimes called al-Baṣrī after his birthplace Basra in Iraq, or al-Miṣrī. Ibn al-Haytham was born c.965 in Basra, which was part of the Buyid emirate. Alhazen arrived in Cairo under the reign of Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim, Alhazen continued to live in Cairo, in the neighborhood of the famous University of al-Azhar, until his death in 1040. Legend has it that after deciding the scheme was impractical and fearing the caliphs anger, during this time, he wrote his influential Book of Optics and continued to write further treatises on astronomy, geometry, number theory, optics and natural philosophy. Among his students were Sorkhab, a Persian from Semnan who was his student for three years, and Abu al-Wafa Mubashir ibn Fatek, an Egyptian prince who learned mathematics from Alhazen. Alhazen made significant contributions to optics, number theory, geometry, astronomy, Alhazens work on optics is credited with contributing a new emphasis on experiment. In al-Andalus, it was used by the prince of the Banu Hud dynasty of Zaragossa and author of an important mathematical text. A Latin translation of the Kitab al-Manazir was made probably in the twelfth or early thirteenth century. His research in catoptrics centred on spherical and parabolic mirrors and spherical aberration and he made the observation that the ratio between the angle of incidence and refraction does not remain constant, and investigated the magnifying power of a lens. His work on catoptrics also contains the known as Alhazens problem. Alhazen wrote as many as 200 books, although only 55 have survived, some of his treatises on optics survived only through Latin translation. During the Middle Ages his books on cosmology were translated into Latin, Hebrew, the crater Alhazen on the Moon is named in his honour, as was the asteroid 59239 Alhazen. In honour of Alhazen, the Aga Khan University named its Ophthalmology endowed chair as The Ibn-e-Haitham Associate Professor, Alhazen, by the name Ibn al-Haytham, is featured on the obverse of the Iraqi 10, 000-dinar banknote issued in 2003, and on 10-dinar notes from 1982. The 2015 International Year of Light celebrated the 1000th anniversary of the works on optics by Ibn Al-Haytham, Alhazens most famous work is his seven-volume treatise on optics Kitab al-Manazir, written from 1011 to 1021. Optics was translated into Latin by a scholar at the end of the 12th century or the beginning of the 13th century

6.
Roger Bacon
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In the early modern era, he was regarded as a wizard and particularly famed for the story of his mechanical or necromantic brazen head. He is sometimes credited as one of the earliest European advocates of the scientific method inspired by Aristotle. His linguistic work has been heralded for its exposition of a universal grammar. However, more recent re-evaluations emphasise that Bacon was essentially a medieval thinker and he was, however, partially responsible for a revision of the medieval university curriculum, which saw the addition of optics to the traditional quadrivium. A survey of how Bacons work was received over the found that it often reflected the concerns. Bacons major work, the Opus Majus, was sent to Pope Clement IV in Rome in 1267 upon the popes request, although gunpowder was first invented and described in China, Bacon was the first in Europe to record its formula. Roger Bacon was born in Ilchester in Somerset, England, in the early 13th century, although his date of birth is sometimes narrowed down to c. 1210,1213 or 1214, however, historians most agree on c. 1220. The only source for his date is a statement from his 1267 Opus Tertium that forty years have passed since I first learned the Alphabetum. His family appears to have been well off, Bacon became a master at Oxford, lecturing on Aristotle. There is no evidence he was awarded a doctorate. A caustic cleric named Roger Bacon is recorded speaking before the king at Oxford in 1233, in 1237 or some time over the next decade, he accepted an invitation to teach at the University of Paris. While there, he lectured on Latin grammar, Aristotelian logic, arithmetic, geometry, and his faculty colleagues included Robert Kilwardby, Albertus Magnus, and Peter of Spain, the future Pope John XXI. The Cornishman Richard Rufus was a scholarly opponent, in 1247 or soon after, he left his position in Paris. As a private scholar, his whereabouts for the decade are uncertain but he was likely in Oxford c. 1248–51, where he met Adam Marsh. He seems to have studied most of the known Greek and Arabic works on optics, a passage in the Opus Tertium states that at some point he took a two-year break from his studies. Pope Urban IV absolved the king of his oath in 1261 and, after an initial abortive resistance, Bacons own family were considered royal partisans, De Montforts men seized their property and drove several members into exile. In 1256 or 57, he became a friar in the Franciscan Order in either Paris or Oxford, following the example of scholarly English Franciscans such as Grosseteste and Marsh. After 1260, Bacons activities were restricted by a statute prohibiting the friars of his order from publishing books or pamphlets without prior approval

7.
Ancient Greece
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Ancient Greece was a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th-9th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and this was followed by the period of Classical Greece, an era that began with the Greco-Persian Wars, lasting from the 5th to 4th centuries BC. Due to the conquests by Alexander the Great of Macedonia, Hellenistic civilization flourished from Central Asia to the end of the Mediterranean Sea. Classical Greek culture, especially philosophy, had a influence on ancient Rome. For this reason Classical Greece is generally considered to be the culture which provided the foundation of modern Western culture and is considered the cradle of Western civilization. Classical Antiquity in the Mediterranean region is considered to have begun in the 8th century BC. Classical Antiquity in Greece is preceded by the Greek Dark Ages and this period is succeeded, around the 8th century BC, by the Orientalizing Period during which a strong influence of Syro-Hittite, Jewish, Assyrian, Phoenician and Egyptian cultures becomes apparent. The end of the Dark Ages is also dated to 776 BC. The Archaic period gives way to the Classical period around 500 BC, Ancient Periods Astronomical year numbering Dates are approximate, consult particular article for details The history of Greece during Classical Antiquity may be subdivided into five major periods. The earliest of these is the Archaic period, in which artists made larger free-standing sculptures in stiff, the Archaic period is often taken to end with the overthrow of the last tyrant of Athens and the start of Athenian Democracy in 508 BC. It was followed by the Classical period, characterized by a style which was considered by observers to be exemplary, i. e. classical, as shown in the Parthenon. This period saw the Greco-Persian Wars and the Rise of Macedon, following the Classical period was the Hellenistic period, during which Greek culture and power expanded into the Near and Middle East. This period begins with the death of Alexander and ends with the Roman conquest, Herodotus is widely known as the father of history, his Histories are eponymous of the entire field. Herodotus was succeeded by authors such as Thucydides, Xenophon, Demosthenes, Plato, most of these authors were either Athenian or pro-Athenian, which is why far more is known about the history and politics of Athens than those of many other cities. Their scope is limited by a focus on political, military and diplomatic history, ignoring economic. In the 8th century BC, Greece began to emerge from the Dark Ages which followed the fall of the Mycenaean civilization, literacy had been lost and Mycenaean script forgotten, but the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet, modifying it to create the Greek alphabet. The Lelantine War is the earliest documented war of the ancient Greek period and it was fought between the important poleis of Chalcis and Eretria over the fertile Lelantine plain of Euboea. Both cities seem to have suffered a decline as result of the long war, a mercantile class arose in the first half of the 7th century BC, shown by the introduction of coinage in about 680 BC

8.
Classical element
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Ancient cultures in Egypt, Babylonia, Japan, Tibet, and India had similar lists, sometimes referring in local languages to air as wind and the fifth element as void. The Chinese Wu Xing system lists Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and these different cultures and even individual philosophers had widely varying explanations concerning their attributes and how they related to observable phenomena as well as cosmology. Sometimes these theories overlapped with mythology and were personified in deities, some of these interpretations included atomism but other interpretations considered the elements to be divisible into infinitely small pieces without changing their nature. Centuries of empirical investigation have proven that all the ancient systems were incorrect explanations of the physical world. It is now known that atomic theory is an explanation, and that atoms can be classified into more than a hundred chemical elements such as oxygen, iron. These elements form chemical compounds and mixtures, and under different temperatures and pressures, the concept of the five elements formed a basis of analysis in both Hinduism and Buddhism. In Hinduism, particularly in a context, the four states-of-matter describe matter. Similar lists existed in ancient China and Japan, in Buddhism the four great elements, to which two others are sometimes added, are not viewed as substances, but as categories of sensory experience. A Greek text called the Kore Kosmou ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, names the four fire, water, air. And, on the contrary, again some are made enemies of fire, and some of water, some of earth, and some of air, and some of two of them, and some of three, and some of all. For instance, son, the locust and all flies flee fire, the eagle and the hawk and all high-flying birds flee water, fish, air and earth, the snake avoids the open air. Not that some of the animals as well do not love fire, for instance salamanders and it is because one or another of the elements doth form their bodies outer envelope. Each soul, accordingly, while it is in its body is weighted and constricted by these four. According to Galen, these elements were used by Hippocrates in describing the body with an association with the four humours, yellow bile, black bile, blood. Medical care was flexible and primarily about helping the patient stay in or return to his/her own personal natural balanced state. In other Babylonian texts these phenomena are considered independent of their association with deities, though they are not treated as the component elements of the universe, the five elements are associated with the five senses, and act as the gross medium for the experience of sensations. The basest element, earth, created using all the elements, can be perceived by all five senses – hearing, touch, sight, taste. The next higher element, water, has no odor but can be heard, felt, seen, next comes fire, which can be heard, felt and seen

9.
Science in the medieval Islamic world
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Science in the medieval Islamic world was the science developed and practised during the Islamic Golden Age under the Abbasid Caliphate. Islamic scientific achievements encompassed a range of subject areas, especially astronomy, mathematics. Other subjects of scientific inquiry included alchemy and chemistry, botany, geography and cartography, ophthalmology, pharmacology, physics, in the 8th century, scholars had translated Indian, Assyrian, Sassanian and Greek knowledge, including the works of Aristotle, into Arabic. These translations became a wellspring for advances by scientists from Muslim-ruled areas during the Middle Ages, major religious and cultural works of the empire were translated into Arabic. The culture inherited Greek, Indic, Assyrian and Persian influences, an era of high culture and innovation ensued. Islamic scientific achievements encompass a range of subject areas, especially mathematics, astronomy. Other subjects of scientific inquiry included physics, alchemy and chemistry, ophthalmology, alchemists supposed that gold was the noblest metal, and that other metals formed a series down to the basest, such as lead. They believed, too, that an element, the elixir. Jabir ibn Hayyan wrote on alchemy, based on his own experiments and he described laboratory techniques and experimental methods that would continue to be used when alchemy had transformed into chemistry. Ibn Hayyan identified many substances including sulfuric and nitric acids and he described processes including sublimation, reduction and distillation. He utilized equipment such as the alembic and the retort stand, there is considerable uncertainty as to the actual provenance of many works that are ascribed to him. Astronomy was one of the disciplines within Islamic science. Al-Battani accurately determined the length of the solar year and he contributed to numeric tables, such as the Tables of Toledo, used by astronomers to predict the movements of the sun, moon and planets across the sky. Some of his tables were later used by Copernicus. Al-Zarqali developed a more accurate astrolabe, used for centuries afterwards and he constructed a water clock in Toledo. He discovered that the Suns apogee moves slowly relative to the fixed stars, nasir al-Din al-Tusi wrote an important revision to Ptolemys celestial model. When he became Helagus astrologer, he was given an observatory and gained access to Chinese techniques and he developed trigonometry as a separate field, and compiled the most accurate astronomical tables available up to that time. The study of the world extended to a detailed examination of plants

10.
Galileo affair
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In 1610, Galileo published his Sidereus Nuncius, describing the surprising observations that he had made with the new telescope, namely the phases of Venus and the Galilean moons of Jupiter. With these observations he promoted the theory of Nicolaus Copernicus. Galileos initial discoveries were met with opposition within the Catholic Church, heliocentric books were banned and Galileo was ordered to refrain from holding, teaching or defending heliocentric ideas. Galileo went on to propose a theory of tides in 1616, in 1632 Galileo, now an old man, published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which implicitly defended heliocentrism, and was immensely popular. Galileo was kept under house arrest until his death in 1642, other observations followed, including the phases of Venus and the existence of sunspots. In 1611, Galileo visited the Collegium Romanum in Rome, where the Jesuit astronomers by that time had repeated his observations, truly, just as the asp stops its ears, so do these philosophers shut their eyes to the light of truth. Brahe argued that the distance to the stars in the Copernican system would have to be 700 times greater than the distance from the sun to Saturn, Galileo became involved in a dispute over priority in the discovery of sunspots with Christoph Scheiner, a Jesuit. This became a lifelong feud. Neither of them, however, was the first to recognise sunspots—the Chinese had already been familiar with them for centuries, at this time, Galileo also engaged in a dispute over the reasons that objects float or sink in water, siding with Archimedes against Aristotle. The debate was unfriendly, and Galileos blunt and sometimes sarcastic style, though not extraordinary in academic debates of the time, according to Cigoli, one of the plotters asked a priest to denounce Galileos views from the pulpit, but the latter refused. Nevertheless, three years later another priest, Tommaso Caccini, did in fact do precisely that, as described below. Geostaticism agreed with an interpretation of Scripture in several places, such as 1 Chronicles 16,30, Psalm 93,1, Psalm 96,10, Psalm 104,5. Heliocentrism, the theory that the Earth was a planet, which along with all the others revolved around the Sun, contradicted both geocentrism and the prevailing theological support of the theory. One of the first suggestions of heresy that Galileo had to deal with came in 1613 from a professor of philosophy, poet and specialist in Greek literature, Galileo was defended on the spot by his former student Benedetto Castelli, now a professor of mathematics and Benedictine abbot. Later, in 1615, he expanded this into his much longer Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, in late 1614 or early 1615, one of Caccinis fellow Dominicans, Niccolò Lorini, acquired a copy of Galileos letter to Castelli. Lorini and other Dominicans at the Convent of San Marco considered the letter of doubtful orthodoxy, Lorini and his colleagues decided to bring Galileos letter to the attention of the Inquisition. Were taking it upon themselves to expound the Holy Scripture according to their private lights, on March 19, Caccini arrived at the Inquisitions offices in Rome to denounce Galileo for his Copernicanism and various other alleged heresies supposedly being spread by his pupils. Galileo soon heard reports that Lorini had obtained a copy of his letter to Castelli and was claiming that it contained many heresies and he also heard that Caccini had gone to Rome and suspected him of trying to stir up trouble with Lorinis copy of the letter

11.
Age of Enlightenment
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The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement which dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 18th century, The Century of Philosophy. In France, the doctrines of les Lumières were individual liberty and religious tolerance in opposition to an absolute monarchy. French historians traditionally place the Enlightenment between 1715, the year that Louis XIV died, and 1789, the beginning of the French Revolution, some recent historians begin the period in the 1620s, with the start of the scientific revolution. Les philosophes of the widely circulated their ideas through meetings at scientific academies, Masonic lodges, literary salons, coffee houses. The ideas of the Enlightenment undermined the authority of the monarchy and the Church, a variety of 19th-century movements, including liberalism and neo-classicism, trace their intellectual heritage back to the Enlightenment. The Age of Enlightenment was preceded by and closely associated with the scientific revolution, earlier philosophers whose work influenced the Enlightenment included Francis Bacon, René Descartes, John Locke, and Baruch Spinoza. The major figures of the Enlightenment included Cesare Beccaria, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin visited Europe repeatedly and contributed actively to the scientific and political debates there and brought the newest ideas back to Philadelphia. Thomas Jefferson closely followed European ideas and later incorporated some of the ideals of the Enlightenment into the Declaration of Independence, others like James Madison incorporated them into the Constitution in 1787. The most influential publication of the Enlightenment was the Encyclopédie, the ideas of the Enlightenment played a major role in inspiring the French Revolution, which began in 1789. After the Revolution, the Enlightenment was followed by an intellectual movement known as Romanticism. René Descartes rationalist philosophy laid the foundation for enlightenment thinking and his attempt to construct the sciences on a secure metaphysical foundation was not as successful as his method of doubt applied in philosophic areas leading to a dualistic doctrine of mind and matter. His skepticism was refined by John Lockes 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding and his dualism was challenged by Spinozas uncompromising assertion of the unity of matter in his Tractatus and Ethics. Both lines of thought were opposed by a conservative Counter-Enlightenment. In the mid-18th century, Paris became the center of an explosion of philosophic and scientific activity challenging traditional doctrines, the political philosopher Montesquieu introduced the idea of a separation of powers in a government, a concept which was enthusiastically adopted by the authors of the United States Constitution. Francis Hutcheson, a philosopher, described the utilitarian and consequentialist principle that virtue is that which provides, in his words. Much of what is incorporated in the method and some modern attitudes towards the relationship between science and religion were developed by his protégés David Hume and Adam Smith. Hume became a figure in the skeptical philosophical and empiricist traditions of philosophy. Immanuel Kant tried to reconcile rationalism and religious belief, individual freedom and political authority, as well as map out a view of the sphere through private

12.
John William Draper
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John William Draper was an English-American scientist, philosopher, physician, chemist, historian and photographer. He is credited with producing the first clear photograph of a female face and he was also the first president of the American Chemical Society and a founder of the New York University School of Medicine. One of Drapers books, the History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, popularised the conflict thesis proposing intrinsic hostility in the relationship between religion and science and it was widely read, and was translated into several languages. His son, Henry Draper, and his granddaughter, Antonia Maury, were astronomers, her sister, Carlotta Maury was a paleontologist. John William Draper was born May 5,1811 in St. Helens, Lancashire, England to John Christopher Draper and he also had three sisters, Dorothy Catherine, Elizabeth Johnson, and Sarah Ripley. On June 23, he was baptized by the Wesleyan minister Jabez Bunting and his father often needed to move the family due to serving various congregations throughout England. John Wm. Draper was home tutored until 1822, when he entered Woodhouse Grove School and he returned to home instruction prior to entering University College London in 1829. While at University College London, Draper studied chemistry under the direction of Edward Turner, on September 13,1831, John William Draper married Antonia Coetana de Paiva Pereira Gardner, the daughter of Daniel Gardner, a court physician to John VI of Portugal and Charlotte of Spain. Antonia was born in Brazil after the family fled Portugal with Napoleons invasion. There is dispute as to the identity of Antonias mother, around 1830, Antonia was sent with her brother Daniel to live with their aunt in London. Following his fathers death in July 1831, John Williams mother was urged to move with her children to the US state of Virginia, John William hoped to acquire a teaching position at a local Methodist college. In 1832, the family settled in Mecklenburg County, Virginia,7 1⁄2 miles east of Christiansville, although he arrived too late to obtain the prospective teaching position, John William established a laboratory in Christiansville. Here he conducted experiments and published eight papers before entering medical school and his sister, Dorothy Catherine Draper provided finances through teaching drawing and painting for his medical education. In March 1836, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and that same year, he began teaching at Hampden–Sydney College in Virginia. In 1837, Draper accepted an appointment to be head of chemistry in a medical school at New York University. In 1839, Draper was elected professor of chemistry and botany at the university. In 1839–1840, Draper produced clear photographs, which at time were regarded as the first life photographs of a human face. Draper took a series of pictures, with a 65-second exposure in sunlight, the first ones, of a female assistant whose face was covered with a thin layer of flour to increase contrast, were not preserved

13.
Conflict thesis
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The thesis retains support among some scientists and in the public, while most historians of science do not support the original strict form of the thesis. The scientist John William Draper and the writer Andrew Dickson White were the most influential exponents of the conflict thesis between religion and science. In the introduction, White emphasized that he arrived at his position after the difficulties of assisting Ezra Cornell in establishing a university without any religious affiliation. During the 20th century, historians acceptance of the conflict thesis declined until rejected in the 1970s, biologist Stephen Jay Gould said, Whites and Drapers accounts of the actual interaction between science and religion in Western history do not differ greatly. Both tell a tale of bright progress continually sparked by science, and both develop and use the same myths to support their narrative, the flat-earth legend prominently among them. The same is nearly as true of White, though his prominent apparatus of prolific footnotes may create an impression of meticulous scholarship. The Galileo affair is one of the few commonly used by advocates of the conflict thesis. He notes that the situation was complex and objections to the Copernican system included scientific, philosophical, in 1610, Galileo published his Sidereus Nuncius, describing the surprising observations that he had made with the new telescope, namely the phases of Venus and the Galilean moons of Jupiter. With these observations he promoted the theory of Nicolaus Copernicus. Galileos initial discoveries were met with opposition within the Catholic Church, heliocentric books were banned and Galileo was ordered to refrain from holding, teaching or defending heliocentric ideas. Pope Urban VIII had been an admirer and supporter of Galileo, Urban may have rather viewed Heliocentrism as a potentially dangerous or rash doctrine that nevertheless had utility in astronomical calculations. In 1632 Galileo, now an old man, published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which implicitly defended heliocentrism, and was popular. Pope Urban VIII had asked that his own views on the matter be included in Galileos book and this angered the Pope and weakened Galileos position politically. Galileos Dialogue was banned, the publication of his past or future works forbidden, he was ordered to abjure, curse, Galileo was kept under house arrest until his death in 1642. Copernicus work De revolutionibus remained on the Index of banned books until 1758, Science will win because it works. A study done on scientists from 21 American universities showed that most did not perceive conflict between science and religion, scientists who had grown up with a religion and retained that identity or had identified as spiritual or had religious attendance tended to perceive less or no conflict. However, those not attending religious services were more likely to adopt a conflict paradigm, additionally, scientists were more likely to reject conflict thesis if their peers held positive views of religion. Lindberg and Numbers point out there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge Earths sphericity

14.
Richard Dawkins
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Clinton Richard Dawkins FRS FRSL is an English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. He is a fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxfords Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. Dawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, in 2006, he founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Dawkins is an atheist, and is known for his criticism of creationism. In The Blind Watchmaker, he argues against the watchmaker analogy, instead, he describes evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker in that reproduction, mutation, and selection are unguided by any designer. In The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and he opposes the teaching of creationism in schools. Dawkins was born in Nairobi, then in British Kenya, on 26 March 1941 and he is the son of Jean Mary Vyvyan and Clinton John Dawkins, who was an agricultural civil servant in the British Colonial Service in Nyasaland. His father was called up into the Kings African Rifles during World War II and returned to England in 1949 and his father had inherited a country estate, Over Norton Park in Oxfordshire, which he farmed commercially. Dawkins considers himself English and lives in Oxford, England, both his parents were interested in natural sciences, and they answered Dawkinss questions in scientific terms. Dawkins describes his childhood as a normal Anglican upbringing, and that left me with nothing. From 1954 to 1959 Dawkins attended Oundle School in Northamptonshire, an English public school with a distinct Church of England flavour, while at Oundle Dawkins read Bertrand Russells Why I Am Not a Christian for the first time. He studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1962, while there and he continued as a research student under Tinbergens supervision, receiving his MA and DPhil degrees by 1966, and remained a research assistant for another year. Tinbergen was a pioneer in the study of behaviour, particularly in the areas of instinct, learning and choice. From 1967 to 1969, he was an assistant professor of zoology at the University of California, during this period, the students and faculty at UC Berkeley were largely opposed to the ongoing Vietnam War, and Dawkins became involved in the anti-war demonstrations and activities. He returned to the University of Oxford in 1970 as a lecturer, in 1990, he became a reader in zoology. He held that professorship from 1995 until 2008, since 1970, he has been a fellow of New College, Oxford and he is now an emeritus fellow. In 1991, he gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for Children on Growing Up in the Universe and he has also edited several journals, and has acted as editorial advisor to the Encarta Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia of Evolution. He is listed as an editor and a columnist of the Council for Secular Humanisms Free Inquiry magazine

15.
Steven Weinberg
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He holds the Josey Regental Chair in Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a member of the Physics and Astronomy Departments. His research on elementary particles and physical cosmology has been honored with numerous prizes and awards, including in 1979 the Nobel Prize in Physics and in 1991 the National Medal of Science. He has been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences and Britains Royal Society, as well as to the American Philosophical Society, Weinbergs articles on various subjects occasionally appear in The New York Review of Books and other periodicals. He has served as consultant at the U. S, Steven Weinberg was born in 1933 in New York City. He graduated from Bronx High School of Science in 1950 and he was in the same graduating class as Sheldon Glashow, whose own research, independent of Weinbergs, would result in their sharing the 1979 Nobel in Physics. Weinberg received his bachelors degree from Cornell University in 1954 and he then went to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen where he started his graduate studies and research. After one year, Weinberg moved to Princeton University where he earned his PhD degree in physics in 1957, after completing his PhD, Weinberg worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University and University of California, Berkeley and then he was promoted to faculty at Berkeley. He did research in a variety of topics of physics, such as the high energy behavior of quantum field theory, symmetry breaking, pion scattering, infrared photons. Both textbooks are among the most influential texts in the community in their subjects. In 1966, Weinberg left Berkeley and accepted a position at Harvard. In 1967 he was a professor at MIT. One of its fundamental aspects was the prediction of the existence of the Higgs boson, the 1973 experimental discovery of weak neutral currents was one verification of the electroweak unification. The paper by Weinberg in which he presented this theory is one of the most cited works ever in high energy physics, in the years after 1967, the full Standard Model of elementary particle theory was developed through the work of many contributors. In 1973 Weinberg proposed a modification of the Standard Model which did not contain that models fundamental Higgs boson, Weinberg became Higgins Professor of Physics at Harvard University in 1973. In 1979, some six years after the discovery of the neutral currents – i. e. In 1982 Weinberg moved to the University of Texas at Austin as the Jack S. Josey-Welch Foundation Regents Chair in Science, Steven Weinberg is frequently among the top scientists with highest research effect indices, such as the h-index and the creativity index. His books on science written for the public combine the typical scientific popularization with what is traditionally considered history and philosophy of science, Weinberg was a major participant in what is known as the Science Wars, standing with Paul R. Although still teaching physics, he has, in recent years, turned his hand to the history of science, efforts that culminated in To Explain the World, The Discovery of Modern Science

16.
Carl Sagan
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Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, science popularizer, and science communicator in astronomy and other natural sciences. He is best known for his work as a science popularizer and his best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan argued the now accepted hypothesis that the surface temperatures of Venus can be attributed to. Sagan published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books. He wrote many science books, such as The Dragons of Eden, Brocas Brain and Pale Blue Dot. The most widely watched series in the history of American public television, the book Cosmos was published to accompany the series. He also wrote the science fiction novel Contact, the basis for a 1997 film of the same name and his papers, containing 595,000 items, are archived at The Library of Congress. Sagan always advocated scientific skeptical inquiry and the method, pioneered exobiology. He spent most of his career as a professor of astronomy at Cornell University and he married three times and had five children. After suffering from myelodysplasia, Sagan died of pneumonia at the age of 62, Carl Sagan was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Samuel Sagan, was an immigrant garment worker from Kamianets-Podilskyi, then Russian Empire and his mother, Rachel Molly Gruber, was a housewife from New York. Carl was named in honor of Rachels biological mother, Chaiya Clara, in Sagans words and he had a sister, Carol, and the family lived in a modest apartment near the Atlantic Ocean, in Bensonhurst, a Brooklyn neighborhood. According to Sagan, they were Reform Jews, the most liberal of North American Judaisms four main groups, both Sagan and his sister agreed that their father was not especially religious, but that their mother definitely believed in God, and was active in the temple. During the depths of the Depression, his father worked as a theater usher, according to biographer Keay Davidson, Sagans inner war was a result of his close relationship with both of his parents, who were in many ways opposites. Sagan traced his later analytical urges to his mother, a woman who had extremely poor as a child in New York City during World War I. As a young woman she had held her own ambitions, but they were frustrated by social restrictions, her poverty, her status as a woman and a wife. Davidson notes that she therefore worshipped her only son, Carl and he would fulfill her unfulfilled dreams. However, he claimed that his sense of wonder came from his father, in his free time he gave apples to the poor or helped soothe labor-management tensions within New Yorks garment industry

17.
Creationism
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Creationism is the religious belief that the universe and life originated from specific acts of divine creation, as opposed to the scientific conclusion that they came about through natural processes. Creationists base their beliefs on a fundamentalist reading of texts, including the creation myths found in Genesis. For young Earth creationists, these beliefs are based on a literalist interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative, literalist creationists believe that evolution cannot adequately account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on Earth. Pseudoscientific branches of creationism include creation science, flood geology, and intelligent design, as well as subsets of pseudoarchaeology, pseudohistory and this story is the basis of Creationist cosmology and biology. The Genesis flood narrative tells how God destroys the world and all life through a great flood and this forms the basis of Creationist geology, better known as flood geology. Several attempts have been made to categorize the different types of creationism, Creationism covers a spectrum of beliefs which have been categorized into the general types listed below. Most young Earth creationists believe that the universe has an age as the Earth. A few assign a much older age to the universe than to Earth, Creationist cosmologies give the universe an age consistent with the Ussher chronology and other young Earth time frames. The Christian organizations Institute for Creation Research and the Creation Research Society both promote young Earth creationism in the US. Another organization with similar views, Answers in Genesis —based in both the US and the United Kingdom—has opened the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, to promote young Earth creationism. Creation Ministries International promotes young Earth views in Australia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, the US, among Roman Catholics, the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation promotes similar ideas. Old Earth creationism holds that the universe was created by God. This group generally believes that the age of the universe and the age of the Earth are as described by astronomers and geologists, but that details of modern evolutionary theory are questionable. Old Earth creationism itself comes in at least three types, Gap creationism, also called restoration creationism, holds that life was created on a pre-existing old Earth. This version of creationism relies on an interpretation of Genesis 1. It is considered that the words formless and void in fact denote waste and ruin, taking account the original Hebrew. Genesis 1, 1–2 is consequently translated, In the beginning God created the heaven, and the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, thus, the six days of creation start sometime after the Earth was without form and void

18.
Francisco J. Ayala
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Francisco José Ayala Pereda is a Spanish-American evolutionary biologist and philosopher at the University of California, Irvine. He is a former Dominican priest, ordained in 1960, after graduating from the University of Salamanca, he moved to the US in 1961 to study for a PhD at Columbia University. There, he studied for his doctorate under Theodosius Dobzhansky, graduating in 1964 and he became a US citizen in 1971. He has been President and Chairman of the Board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and he is known for his research on population and evolutionary genetics, and has been called the Renaissance Man of Evolutionary Biology. He has been critical of U. S. restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. He currently serves on the board of the Campaign to Defend the Constitution. He is also a critic of creationism and intelligent design theories, claiming that they are not only pseudoscience and he suggests that the theory of evolution resolves the problem of evil, thus being a kind of theodicy. Although Ayala generally does not discuss his religious views, he has stated that science is compatible with religious faith in a personal and he also briefly served, in 1960, as a Dominican priest. He also identifies as a Christian and he attended the Beyond Belief symposium on November 2006. Ayala debated Christian apologist William Lane Craig in November 2009 on the topic of Intelligent Design, in 2001, Ayala was awarded the National Medal of Science. On April 13,2007, he was awarded the first of 100 bicentennial medals at Mount Saint Marys University for lecturing there as the first presenter for the Bicentennial Distinguished Lecture Series and his lecture was entitled The Biological Foundations of Morality. In 2010, he was awarded the Templeton Prize, the science library at UCI is named after him. Ayala delivered a lecture at the Trotter Prize ceremony in 2011 entitled Darwins Gift to Science, in 2014, UCI named its School of Biological Sciences the Francisco J. Ayala School of Biological Sciences after Ayala. Ayala was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and he is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Francisco Ayala was born to Francisco Ayala and Soledad Pereda, in the late 1960s he met Mary Henderson, they married on May 27,1968. They had two sons, Francisco José and Carlos Alberto and their marriage ended in divorce, and in 1985 he married an ecologist named Hana Ayala. On October 18,2011, it was announced that Professor Ayala would be donating $10 million of his own fortune to UCIs School of Biological Sciences, the gift will be $1 million a year for the next decade. Ayala has published 950 publications and 30 books, recently published books include, Ayala, F. J. Evolution, Explanation, Ethics and Aesthetics, Towards a Philosophy of Biology

19.
Kenneth R. Miller
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Kenneth Raymond Miller is an American cell biologist and molecular biologist who is currently Professor of Biology and Royce Family Professor for Teaching Excellence at Brown University. Millers primary research focus is the structure and function of cell membranes, Miller is a co-author of a major introductory college and high school biology textbook published by Prentice Hall since 1990. Miller, who is Roman Catholic, is known for his opposition to creationism. Miller graduated from Rahway High School in Rahway, New Jersey before attending Brown University, at Brown, he received his Sc. B. in biology in 1970. He earned his Ph. D. in biology from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1974, from 1974 to 1980, he taught at Harvard University. His research involves problems of structure and function in biological membranes, in May 2014, Miller received the Laetare Medal at the University of Notre Dame. Miller is the co-author of an introductory college and high school biology textbook published by Prentice Hall since 1990. The current edition was published in 2010 by Pearson, Miller and Levine have also co-written a college-level textbook published by the former D. C. Heath and Company, first edition in 1991, entitled Biology, Miller has voiced his support for what he calls pro-science candidates in politics. He has campaigned for school board and education candidates who support the teaching of evolution in Kansas, in the science community, he has sought to elevate the understanding of scientists of the roots of the creationist movement, and to encourage the popularization of scientific concepts. Miller has appeared in court as a witness, and on panels debating the teaching of intelligent design in schools, in 2002, the Ohio State Board of Education held a public debate between two scientists, including Miller, and two proponents of intelligent design. In 2005, the judge ruled that the stickers violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and this decision was vacated on appeal because of missing records of the previous trial. The case was remanded back to the court and was eventually settled out of court. Miller was also the lead expert witness in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. The judge in that also ruled decisively in favor of the plaintiffs. In 2006 the American Society for Cell Biology gave him a Public Service Award, the American Association for the Advancement of Science also recognized Miller for his contribution to the public education of evolution in the United States. He won the 2008 AAAS Award for Public Understanding of Science, Miller has also spoken at the Veritas Forum on topics such as the relationship between science and religion and the existence of God. Miller is known for his appearances on the Comedy Central television show The Colbert Report, Miller has also made many appearances on C-SPAN debating proponents of creationism and intelligent design

20.
Francis Collins
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Francis Sellers Collins is an American physician-geneticist noted for his discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the Human Genome Project. He is director of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, before joining NHGRI, he earned a reputation as a gene hunter at the University of Michigan. He has been elected to the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, and has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science. Collins also has written a number of books on science, medicine, in 2009 Pope Benedict XVI appointed Collins to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Collins was born in Staunton, Virginia, the youngest of four sons of Fletcher Collins, raised on a small farm in Virginias Shenandoah Valley, Collins was home schooled until the sixth grade. He attended Robert E. Lee High School in Staunton, Virginia, through most of his high school and college years he aspired to be a chemist, and he had little interest in what he then considered the messy field of biology. What he referred to as his education was received at the University of Virginia. He went on to graduate as a Doctor of Philosophy in Physical Chemistry at Yale University in 1974, while at Yale, a course in biochemistry sparked his interest in the subject. From 1978 to 1981, Collins served a residency and chief residency in medicine at North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill. He then returned to Yale, where he was a Fellow in Human Genetics at the school from 1981 to 1984. The method described was named chromosome jumping, to emphasize the contrast with an older, Collins joined the University of Michigan faculty in 1984, rising to the rank of professor in internal medicine and human genetics. His gene-hunting approach, which he named positional cloning, developed into a component of modern molecular genetics. Several scientific teams worked in the 1970s and 1980s to identify genes, progress was modest until 1985, when Lap-Chee Tsui and colleagues at Torontos Hospital for Sick Children identified the locus for the gene. The gene was identified in June 1989, and the results were published in the journal Science on September 8,1989 and this identification was followed by other genetic discoveries made by Collins and a variety of collaborators. They included isolation of the genes for Huntingtons disease, neurofibromatosis, multiple endocrine neoplasia type 1, inv AML, as director, he oversaw the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, which was the group that successfully carried out the Human Genome Project. In 1994 Collins founded NHGRIs Division of Intramural Research, a collection of investigator-directed laboratories that conduct research on the NIH campus. In June 2000 Collins was joined by President Bill Clinton and biologist Craig Venter in making the announcement of a draft of the human genome. He stated that It is humbling for me, and awe-inspiring to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, another major activity at NHGRI during his tenure as director was the creation of the haplotype map of the human genome

21.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of science of his generation. Gould spent most of his teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996 Gould was also appointed as the Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University, Goulds most significant contribution to evolutionary biology was the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which he developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972. The theory proposes that most evolution is characterized by periods of evolutionary stability. The theory was contrasted against phyletic gradualism, the idea that evolutionary change is marked by a pattern of smooth. Most of Goulds empirical research was based on the land snail genera Poecilozonites and he also contributed to evolutionary developmental biology, and received wide praise for his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny. In evolutionary theory he opposed strict selectionism, sociobiology as applied to humans and he campaigned against creationism and proposed that science and religion should be considered two distinct fields whose authorities do not overlap. Gould was known by the public mainly from his 300 popular essays in the magazine Natural History. In April 2000, the US Library of Congress named him a Living Legend, Stephen Jay Gould was born and raised in the community of Bayside, a neighborhood of the northeastern section of Queens in New York City. His father Leonard was a stenographer and a World War II veteran in the United States Navy. His mother Eleanor was an artist whose parents were Jewish immigrants living and working in the citys Garment District, when Gould was five years old his father took him to the Hall of Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History, where he first encountered Tyrannosaurus rex. I had no idea there were such things—I was awestruck, Gould once recalled and it was in that moment that he decided to become a paleontologist. Raised in a secular Jewish home, Gould did not formally practice religion, when asked directly if he was an agnostic in Skeptic magazine, he responded, If you absolutely forced me to bet on the existence of a conventional anthropomorphic deity, of course Id bet no. But, basically, Huxley was right when he said that agnosticism is the honorable position because we really cannot know. Id be real surprised if there turned out to be a conventional God, though he had been brought up by a Marxist father, he stated that his fathers politics were very different from his own. In describing his own views, he has said they tend to the left of center. According to Gould the most influential political books he read were C. Wright Mills The Power Elite, while attending Antioch College in the early 1960s, Gould was active in the civil rights movement and often campaigned for social justice

22.
John Lennox
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John Carson Lennox is a Northern Irish mathematician specialising in group theory, philosopher of science, Christian apologist, and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College and he is also Pastoral Advisor of Green Templeton College and Fellow of Wycliffe Hall. John Lennox was born in 1943 in Northern Ireland and brought up in Armagh where his father ran a store, Lennox obtained an M. A. and PhD. degree at the University of Cambridge on the dissertation Centrality and Permutability in Soluble Groups. He was awarded a D. Sc. degree in mathematics by the University of Cardiff for his research, Lennox furthermore holds a D. Phil. degree from the University of Oxford and an M. A. degree in bioethics at the University of Surrey. Upon completing his doctorate, Lennox moved to Cardiff, Wales, becoming a reader in Mathematics at the University of Wales and he has published over 70 peer-reviewed articles on mathematics and co-authored two Oxford Mathematical Monographs and has worked as a translator of Russian mathematics. Lennox also teaches science and religion in the University of Oxford and his most recent book is God and Stephen Hawking, Whose Design Is It Anyway. He has spoken in different countries, in conferences and as an academic fellow. On 14 March 2012 he presented an edition of the Lent Talks for BBC Radio Four, Lennox has also given lectures at the Veritas forum on topics such as the relationship between science and religion, the existence of God, doubt, and the problems of evil and suffering. Additionally, he is a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum, on 3 October 2007, Lennox debated with Richard Dawkins at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in Birmingham, Alabama on Dawkinss views expressed in his book, The God Delusion. The debate was broadcast to millions worldwide and was described by the Wall Street Journal as a revelation, in Alabama, professors Lennox and Dawkins had a discussion in April 2008 at Trinity College, Oxford to expand upon topics left undeveloped during The God Delusion Debate. On 23 August 2008, Lennox debated with Michael Shermer at the Wesley Conference Centre in Sydney, the debate was titled Has Science Buried God. The Spectator called the event Huxley-Wilberforce, Round Two, on 3 March 2009, Lennox debated with Christopher Hitchens for the second time at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama on the question Is God Great. The debate addressed the validity of some of Hitchens claims in his book God is Not Great, on 20 July 2011, Lennox debated Peter Singer at the Melbourne Town Hall in Melbourne, Australia on the topic Is There a God. Lennox speaks English, Russian, French, and German and he is married to Sally and has three children and five grandchildren. He has a brother named Gilbert Lennox, an elder in Glennabbey Church, the recording artist Kristyn Getty is Johns niece, being Gilberts daughter. He has also taken part in many conferences and debates where he debates with other scientists concerning the existence of God. Stonehewer, Stewart E. Subnormal subgroups of groups, the Theory of Infinite Soluble Groups. Gods Undertaker, Has Science Buried God, seven Days That Divide the World, The Beginning According to Genesis and Science

23.
Thomas Berry
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PhD was a Catholic priest of the Passionist order, cultural historian and ecotheologian. He is considered a leader in the tradition of Teilhard de Chardin, Berry said the transformation of humanity’s priorities will not come easily. Born to William and Betty Berry in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1914 and he was named for his father, William Nathan Berry, who founded Berico Fuels in 1924. At age 11 he had an epiphany in a meadow, which became a reference point for the rest of his life. He later elaborated this experience into a set of Twelve Principles for Understanding the Universe, Berry entered a monastery of the Passionist order in 1933, where he adopted the name Thomas, after Thomas Aquinas. He began studying history, especially the worlds religions. He received his doctorate in history from The Catholic University of America and he then studied Chinese language and Chinese culture in China and learned Sanskrit for the study of India and the traditions of religion in India. He published a book on the religions of India and one on Buddhism, later he was director of the graduate program in the History of Religions at Fordham University. He founded and directed the Riverdale Center of Religious Research in Riverdale, Berry studied and was influenced by the work of Teilhard de Chardin and was president of the American Teilhard Association. He also studied Native American cultures and shamanism, from his academic beginnings as a historian of world cultures and religions, Berry developed into a historian of the Earth and its evolutionary processes. He described himself as a geologian, in 1995, Berry returned to Greensboro, North Carolina. While nominally retired, he continued to write, lecture, a collection of his essays, Evening Thoughts, Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community, was jointly published by Sierra Club Books and the University of California Press. His work continues with the Thomas Berry Foundation, the American Teilhard Association, the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale, the Christian Future and the Fate of Earth, Essays edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim. Berrys Twelve Principles for Understanding the Universe and the Role of the Human in the Universe Process offer a postscript to this 1987 work, Berry was featured in the 2007 documentary What a Way to Go, Life at the End of Empire. Berrys papers are archived at the Environmental Science and Public Policy Archives in the Harvard Library,2008 Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. Elon University, Elon, North Carolina, March 15,20082003 Honorary Doctorate of Theology, the Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, Illinois 1998 Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. The College of Mt. St. Vincent, Riverdale, New York,1997 Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. 1997 Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California

24.
Brian Swimme
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Swimme was a faculty member in the department of mathematics at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, 1978–81. He was a member of the faculty at the Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality at Holy Names University in Oakland, California, Swimme brings the context of story to our understanding of the 14 billion year trajectory of cosmogenesis. Swimme is the producer of three DVD series, Canticle to the Cosmos, The Earth’s Imagination, and The Powers of the Universe. Swimme teamed with Mary Evelyn Tucker, David Kennard, Patsy Northcutt, and Catherine Butler to produce Journey of the Universe and they draw together scientific discoveries in astronomy, geology and biology, with humanistic insights concerning the nature of the universe. It is designed to shape the intellectual, moral and spiritual leadership of its students. Swimmes primary field of research is the nature of the dynamics of the universe. He has developed an interpretation of the human as an emergent being within the universe and earth. His central concern is the role of the human within the community, the cultural implications of the Epic of Evolution. Toward this goal, he founded the Center for the Story of the Universe in 1989 and his published work includes The Universe is a Green Dragon, The Universe Story written with Thomas Berry, and The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos. Swimme’s books have been translated into eight different languages, Swimme was featured in the television series Soul of the Universe and The Sacred Balance produced by David Suzuki. He is the producer of a twelve-part DVD series Canticle to the Cosmos, other DVD programs featuring Swimme’s ideas include The Earth’s Imagination and The Powers of the Universe. Swimme founded the international Epic of Evolution Society in 1998 and this was a result of his participation in the conference Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science the year before. Thomas Berry introduced Swimme to the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, swimmes passion for understanding is deeply influenced by Teilhards ideas. He believes the universe is a deep transfiguration process, love, truth, compassion and zest—all of these qualities regarded as divine become powerfully embodied in the universe. In this way, the universe is imagined as evolving with a telos of Beauty and she believes that he sweeps us into the grand picture of human beings as the current culmination of the still-evolving universe. Swimme tells the story of the evolution of the universe and attempts to pull us into a universe of meaning, where there is not only connectivity, but directionality as well. In Canticle to the Cosmos he says If you look at the disasters happening on our planet, a way out of our difficulty is a journey into the universe as sacred. Harvard astrophysicist Eric Chaisson writes that Swimme, a mathematician by training, seeks a larger, warmer and our story is not merely a collection of facts, science should be a student’s guide to a grand world view, including, if possible, meaning, purpose and value

25.
Ken Wilber
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Kenneth Earl Ken Wilber II is an American writer on transpersonal psychology and his own Integral Theory, a four-quadrant grid which suggests the synthesis of all human knowledge and experience. Wilber was born in 1949 in Oklahoma City, in 1967 he enrolled as a pre-med student at Duke University. He became inspired, like many of his generation, by Eastern literature and he left Duke and enrolled at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, but after a few years dropped out of university to devote all his time to studying his own curriculum and writing books. In 1973 Wilber completed his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness, after rejections by more than twenty publishers it was finally accepted in 1977 by Quest Books, and he spent a year giving lectures and workshops before going back to writing. He also helped to launch the journal ReVision in 1978, in 1982 New Science Library published his anthology The Holographic Paradigm and other Paradoxes, a collection of essays and interviews, including one by David Bohm. The essays, including one of his own, looked at how holography and the holographic paradigm relate to the fields of consciousness, mysticism, in 1983 Wilber married Terry Treya Killam who was shortly thereafter diagnosed with breast cancer. From 1984 until 1987, Wilber gave up most of his writing to care for her, Treya died in January 1989, their joint experience was recorded in the 1991 book Grace and Grit. Subsequently, Wilber wrote Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, the first volume of his Kosmos Trilogy, a Brief History of Everything was the popularised summary of SES in interview format. The Eye of Spirit was a compilation of articles he had written for the journal ReVision on the relationship between science and religion, throughout 1997, he had kept journals of his personal experiences, which were published in 1999 as One Taste, a term for unitary consciousness. Over the next two years his publisher, Shambhala Publications, released eight re-edited volumes of his Collected Works, in 1999, he finished Integral Psychology and wrote A Theory of Everything. In A Theory of Everything Wilber attempts to bridge business, politics, science and spirituality and show how they integrate with theories of developmental psychology and his novel, Boomeritis, attempts to expose what he perceives as the egotism of the Baby Boom Generation. In 1987 Wilber moved to Boulder, Colorado, where he worked on his Kosmos trilogy, Wilber now lives in Denver, Colorado. Wilber has stated that he has an illness called RNase Enzyme Deficiency Disease. Wilbers AQAL, pronounced ah-qwul, is the framework of Integral Theory. It suggests that all knowledge and experience can be placed in a four-quadrant grid, along the axes of interior-exterior. Levels are the stages of development, from pre-personal through personal to transpersonal, lines are lines of development, the several domains of development, which may process uneven, with several stages of development in place at the various domains. States are states of consciousness, according to Wilber persons may have an experience of a higher developmental stage. Types is a rest-category, for phenomena which do not fit in the four concepts

26.
Fact
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A fact is something that has occurred or is correct. The usual test for a statement of fact is verifiability—that is, standard reference works are often used to check facts. Scientific facts are verified by repeatable careful observation or measurement, the word fact derives from the Latin factum, and was first used in English with the same meaning, a thing done or performed, a meaning now obsolete. The common usage of something that has occurred or is the case dates from the middle of the sixteenth century. Fact is sometimes used synonymously with truth, as distinct from opinions, falsehoods and this use is found in such phrases as, It is a fact that the cup is blue or Matter of fact, and. Not history, nor fact, but imagination, filmmaker Werner Herzog distinguishes between the two, claiming that Fact creates norms, and truth illumination. Fact also indicates a matter under discussion deemed to be true or correct, alternatively, fact may also indicate an allegation or stipulation of something that may or may not be a true fact. This alternate usage, although contested by some, has a history in standard English. Fact may also indicate findings derived through a process of evaluation, including review of testimony, direct observation, or otherwise and this use is reflected in the terms fact-find and fact-finder. Facts may be checked by reason, experiment, personal experience, roger Bacon wrote If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics. In philosophy, the fact is considered in epistemology and ontology. Questions of objectivity and truth are closely associated with questions of fact, a fact can be defined as something that is the case—that is, a state of affairs. Facts may be understood as information that makes a sentence true. Facts may also be understood as things to which a true sentence refers. The statement Jupiter is the largest planet in the system is about the fact Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. Engels version of the theory of truth explains that what makes a sentence true is that it corresponds to a fact. This theory presupposes the existence of an objective world, the Slingshot argument claims to show that all true statements stand for the same thing - the truth value true. If this argument holds, and facts are taken to be what true statements stand for, any non-trivial true statement about reality is necessarily an abstraction composed of a complex of objects and properties or relations

27.
United States
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Forty-eight of the fifty states and the federal district are contiguous and located in North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean, the geography, climate and wildlife of the country are extremely diverse. At 3.8 million square miles and with over 324 million people, the United States is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by area, third-largest by land area. It is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, paleo-Indians migrated from Asia to the North American mainland at least 15,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century, the United States emerged from 13 British colonies along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the following the Seven Years War led to the American Revolution. On July 4,1776, during the course of the American Revolutionary War, the war ended in 1783 with recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain, representing the first successful war of independence against a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, after the Articles of Confederation, the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 and designed to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. During the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War led to the end of slavery in the country. By the end of century, the United States extended into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the status as a global military power. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. The U. S. is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States. The United States is a developed country, with the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP. It ranks highly in several measures of performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP. While the U. S. economy is considered post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge economy, the United States is a prominent political and cultural force internationally, and a leader in scientific research and technological innovations. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America after the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci

28.
Natural selection
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Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in heritable traits of a population over time, Charles Darwin popularised the term natural selection, and compared it with artificial selection. Variation exists within all populations of organisms and this occurs partly because random mutations arise in the genome of an individual organism, and offspring can inherit such mutations. Throughout the lives of the individuals, their genomes interact with their environments to cause variations in traits, the environment of a genome includes the molecular biology in the cell, other cells, other individuals, populations, species, as well as the abiotic environment. Individuals with certain variants of the trait may survive and reproduce more than individuals with other, less successful, variants, therefore, factors that affect reproductive success are also important, including sexual selection and fecundity selection. Over time, this process can result in populations that specialise for particular ecological niches, in other words, natural selection is a key process in the evolution of a population. Natural selection can be contrasted with artificial selection, in which humans intentionally choose specific traits, Natural selection is one of the cornerstones of modern biology. The concept of natural selection originally developed in the absence of a theory of heredity, at the time of Darwins writing. The union of traditional Darwinian evolution with subsequent discoveries in classical genetics formed the synthesis of the mid-20th century. The addition of molecular genetics has led to developmental biology. While genotypes can slowly change by random genetic drift, natural selection remains the primary explanation for adaptive evolution, empedocles idea that organisms arose entirely by the incidental workings of causes such as heat and cold was criticised by Aristotle in Book II of Physics. He posited natural teleology in its place, and believed that form was achieved for a purpose, nevertheless, he accepted in his biology that new types of animals, monstrosities, can occur in very rare instances. And in like manner as to the parts in which there appears to exist an adaptation to an end. Yet it is impossible that this should be the true view, for teeth and all other natural things either invariably or normally come about in a given way, but of not one of the results of chance or spontaneity is this true. We do not ascribe to chance or mere coincidence the frequency of rain in winter, but frequent rain in summer we do, nor heat in the dog-days, therefore action for an end is present in things which come to be and are by nature. The struggle for existence was later described by the Islamic writer Al-Jahiz in the 9th century, the classical arguments were reintroduced in the 18th century by Pierre Louis Maupertuis and others, including Darwins grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. Until the early 19th century, the view in Western societies was that differences between individuals of a species were uninteresting departures from their Platonic ideals of created kinds. However, the theory of uniformitarianism in geology promoted the idea that simple and this theory, Lamarckism, was an influence on the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenkos antagonism to mainstream genetic theory as late as the mid 20th century

29.
National Academy of Sciences
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The National Academy of Sciences is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering, as a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Election to the National Academies is one of the highest honors in the scientific field, members serve pro bono as advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine. The group holds a congressional charter under Title 36 of the United States Code, … to provide scientific advice to the government whenever called upon by any government department. The Academy receives no compensation from the government for its services, as of 2016, the National Academy of Sciences includes about 2,350 members and 450 foreign associates. It employed about 1,100 staff in 2005, the current members annually elect new members for life. Approximately 200 members have won a Nobel Prize, the National Academy of Sciences is a member of the International Council for Science. Although there is no relationship with state and local academies of science. The National Academies is governed by a 17-member Council, made up of five officers and 12 Councilors, the National Academy of Sciences meets annually in Washington, D. C. which is documented in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, its scholarly journal. The National Academies Press is the publisher for the National Academies, since 2004, the National Academy of Sciences has administered the Marian Koshland Science Museum to provide public exhibits and programming related to its policy work. The museums current exhibits focus on change and infectious disease. The National Academy of Sciences maintains multiple buildings around the United States, the building has a neoclassical architectural style and was built by architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. The building was dedicated in 1924 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the building is used for lectures, symposia, exhibitions, and concerts, in addition to annual meetings of the NAS, NAE, and NAM. The 2012 Presidential Award for Math and Science Teaching ceremony was held here on March 5,2014, approximately 150 staff members work at the NAS Building. More than 1,000 National Academies staff members work at The Keck Center of the National Academies at 500 Fifth Street in northwest Washington, the Keck Center provides meeting space and houses the National Academies Press Bookstore. The NAS also maintains conference centers in California and Massachusetts, the J. Erik Jonsson Conference Center located at 314 Quissett Avenue in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, is another conference facility. The Act of Incorporation, signed by President Abraham Lincoln on March 3,1863, created the National Academy of Sciences, many of the original NAS members came from the so-called Scientific Lazzaroni, an informal network of mostly physical scientists working in the vicinity of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts was to name Agassiz to the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, Agassiz was to come to Washington at the governments expense to plan the organization with the others

30.
Scientist
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A scientist is a person engaging in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge that describes and predicts the natural world. In a more restricted sense, a scientist may refer to an individual who uses the scientific method, the person may be an expert in one or more areas of science. The term scientist was coined by the theologian, philosopher and historian of science William Whewell and this article focuses on the more restricted use of the word. Scientists perform research toward a comprehensive understanding of nature, including physical, mathematical and social realms. Philosophers aim to provide an understanding of fundamental aspects of reality and experience, often pursuing inquiries with conceptual, rather than empirical. When science is done with a goal toward practical utility, it is called applied science, an applied scientist may not be designing something in particular, but rather is conducting research with the aim of developing new technologies and practical methods. When science seeks to answer questions about aspects of reality it is sometimes called natural philosophy. Science and technology have continually modified human existence through the engineering process, as a profession the scientist of today is widely recognized. Jurisprudence and mathematics are often grouped with the sciences, some of the greatest physicists have also been creative mathematicians and lawyers. There is a continuum from the most theoretical to the most empirical scientists with no distinct boundaries, in terms of personality, interests, training and professional activity, there is little difference between applied mathematicians and theoretical physicists. Scientists can be motivated in several ways, many have a desire to understand why the world is as we see it and how it came to be. They exhibit a strong curiosity about reality, other motivations are recognition by their peers and prestige, or the desire to apply scientific knowledge for the benefit of peoples health, the nations, the world, nature or industries. Scientists tend to be motivated by direct financial reward for their work than other careers. As a result, scientific researchers often accept lower average salaries when compared with other professions which require a similar amount of training. The number of scientists is vastly different from country to country, for instance, there are only 4 full-time scientists per 10,000 workers in India while this number is 79 for the United Kingdom and the United States. According to the US National Science Foundation 4.7 million people with science degrees worked in the United States in 2015, across all disciplines, the figure included twice as many men as women. Of that total, 17% worked in academia, that is, at universities and undergraduate institutions, 5% of scientists worked for the federal government and about 3. 5% were self-employed. Of the latter two groups, two-thirds were men, 59% of US scientists were employed in industry or business, and another 6% worked in non-profit positions

31.
William Whewell
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William Whewell FRS FGS was an English polymath, scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, and historian of science. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, in his time as a student there, he achieved distinction in both poetry and mathematics. What is most often remarked about Whewell is the breadth of his endeavours, in a time of increasing specialisation, Whewell appears as a vestige of an earlier era when natural philosophers dabbled in a bit of everything. In mathematics, Whewell introduced what is now called the Whewell equation, one of Whewells greatest gifts to science was his wordsmithing. He often corresponded with many in his field and helped come up with new terms for their discoveries. Whewell died in Cambridge in 1866 as a result of a fall from his horse and his father, a carpenter, wished him to follow his trade, but his success in mathematics at Lancaster and Heversham grammar schools won him an exhibition at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1814 he was awarded the Chancellors Gold Medal for poetry and he was Second Wrangler in 1816, President of the Cambridge Union Society in 1817, became fellow and tutor of his college, and, in 1841, succeeded Dr Christopher Wordsworth as master. He was professor of mineralogy from 1828 to 1832 and Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy from 1838 to 1855, Whewell died in Cambridge in 1866 as a result of a fall from his horse. He is buried in the Mill Road cemetery, Cambridge, together with his first and second wives, Cordelia Whewell and Everina Frances, in the Philosophy, Whewell attempted to follow Francis Bacons plan for discovery of an effectual art of discovery. He examined ideas and by the colligation of facts endeavoured to unite these ideas with the facts, but no art of discovery, such as Bacon anticipated, follows, for invention, sagacity, genius are needed at each step. In Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences Whewell was the first to use the term consilience to discuss the unification of knowledge between the different branches of learning, here, as in his ethical doctrine, Whewell was moved by opposition to contemporary English empiricism. As stated, one of Whewells greatest gifts to science was his wordsmithing and he often corresponded with many in his field and helped them come up with new terms for their discoveries. Whewell was prominent not only in research and philosophy, but also in university. His first work, An Elementary Treatise on Mechanics, cooperated with those of George Peacock and his work and publications also helped influence the recognition of the moral and natural sciences as an integral part of the Cambridge curriculum. He opposed the appointment of the University Commission, and wrote two pamphlets against the reform of the university and he stood against the scheme of entrusting elections to the members of the senate and instead, advocated the use of college funds and the subvention of scientific and professorial work. The Whewell Professorship of International Law and the Whewell Scholarships were established through the provisions of his will, aside from Science, Whewell was also interested in the history of architecture throughout his life. He is best known for his writings on Gothic architecture, specifically his book, in this work, Whewell established a strict nomenclature for German Gothic churches and came up with a theory of stylistic development. His work is associated with the trend of architectural writers, along with Thomas Rickman

32.
Natural philosophy
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Natural philosophy or philosophy of nature was the philosophical study of nature and the physical universe that was dominant before the development of modern science. It is considered to be the precursor of natural science, from the ancient world, starting with Aristotle, to the 19th century, the term natural philosophy was the common term used to describe the practice of studying nature. Even in the 19th century, a treatise by Lord Kelvin and Peter Guthrie Tait, in the German tradition, Naturphilosophie persisted into the 18th and 19th century as an attempt to achieve a speculative unity of nature and spirit. Some of the greatest names in German philosophy are associated with movement, including Goethe, Hegel. The term natural philosophy preceded our current natural science, empirical science historically developed out of philosophy or, more specifically, natural philosophy. In the 14th and 15th centuries, natural philosophy was one of many branches of philosophy, the first person appointed as a specialist in Natural Philosophy per se was Jacopo Zabarella, at the University of Padua in 1577. Modern meanings of the science and scientists date only to the 19th century. Before that, science was a synonym for knowledge or study, the term gained its modern meaning when experimental science and the scientific method became a specialized branch of study apart from natural philosophy. In general, chairs of Natural Philosophy established long ago at the oldest universities are nowadays occupied mainly by physics professors. Even in the 19th century, a treatise by Lord Kelvin and Peter Guthrie Tait, in Platos earliest known dialogue, Charmides distinguishes between science or bodies of knowledge that produce a physical result, and those that do not. Natural philosophy has been categorized as a rather than a practical branch of philosophy. Sciences that guide arts and draw on the knowledge of nature may produce practical results. The study of natural philosophy seeks to explore the cosmos by any means necessary to understand the universe, some ideas presuppose that change is a reality. George Santayana, in his Scepticism and Animal Faith, attempted to show that the reality of change cannot be proven. If his reasoning is sound, it follows that to be a physicist, one must restrain ones skepticism enough to trust ones senses, rené Descartes metaphysical system of Cartesian Dualism describes two kinds of substance, matter and mind. Humankinds mental engagement with nature certainly predates civilization and the record of history, Philosophical, and specifically non-religious thought about the natural world, goes back to ancient Greece. These lines of thought began before Socrates, who turned from his studies from speculations about nature to a consideration of man. The thought of philosophers such Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Democritus centered on the natural world

33.
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
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William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, OM, GCVO, PC, FRS, FRSE was a Scots-Irish mathematical physicist and engineer who was born in Belfast in 1824. He worked closely with mathematics professor Hugh Blackburn in his work and he also had a career as an electric telegraph engineer and inventor, which propelled him into the public eye and ensured his wealth, fame and honour. For his work on the telegraph project he was knighted in 1866 by Queen Victoria. He had extensive maritime interests and was most noted for his work on the mariners compass, absolute temperatures are stated in units of kelvin in his honour. He was ennobled in 1892 in recognition of his achievements in thermodynamics and he was the first British scientist to be elevated to the House of Lords. The title refers to the River Kelvin, which close by his laboratory at the University of Glasgow. His home was the red sandstone mansion Netherhall, in Largs. William Thomsons father, James Thomson, was a teacher of mathematics and engineering at Royal Belfast Academical Institution, James Thomson married Margaret Gardner in 1817 and, of their children, four boys and two girls survived infancy. Margaret Thomson died in 1830 when William was six years old, William and his elder brother James were tutored at home by their father while the younger boys were tutored by their elder sisters. James was intended to benefit from the share of his fathers encouragement, affection. In 1832, his father was appointed professor of mathematics at Glasgow, the Thomson children were introduced to a broader cosmopolitan experience than their fathers rural upbringing, spending mid-1839 in London and the boys were tutored in French in Paris. Mid-1840 was spent in Germany and the Netherlands, language study was given a high priority. His sister, Anna Thomson, was the mother of James Thomson Bottomley FRSE, Thomson had heart problems and nearly died when he was 9 years old. In school, Thomson showed a keen interest in the classics along with his natural interest in the sciences, at the age of 12 he won a prize for translating Lucian of Samosatas Dialogues of the Gods from Latin to English. In the academic year 1839/1840, Thomson won the prize in astronomy for his Essay on the figure of the Earth which showed an early facility for mathematical analysis. Throughout his life, he would work on the problems raised in the essay as a strategy during times of personal stress. On the title page of this essay Thomson wrote the lines from Alexander Popes Essay on Man. These lines inspired Thomson to understand the world using the power and method of science, Go

34.
Judaism
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Judaism encompasses the religion, philosophy, culture and way of life of the Jewish people. Judaism is an ancient monotheistic Abrahamic religion, with the Torah as its text, and supplemental oral tradition represented by later texts such as the Midrash. Judaism is considered by religious Jews to be the expression of the relationship that God established with the Children of Israel. With between 14.5 and 17.4 million adherents worldwide, Judaism is the tenth-largest religion in the world, Judaism includes a wide corpus of texts, practices, theological positions, and forms of organization. Modern branches of Judaism such as Humanistic Judaism may be nontheistic, today, the largest Jewish religious movements are Orthodox Judaism, Conservative Judaism and Reform Judaism. Major sources of difference between groups are their approaches to Jewish law, the authority of the Rabbinic tradition. Orthodox Judaism maintains that the Torah and Jewish law are divine in origin, eternal and unalterable, Conservative and Reform Judaism are more liberal, with Conservative Judaism generally promoting a more traditional interpretation of Judaisms requirements than Reform Judaism. A typical Reform position is that Jewish law should be viewed as a set of guidelines rather than as a set of restrictions and obligations whose observance is required of all Jews. Historically, special courts enforced Jewish law, today, these still exist. Authority on theological and legal matters is not vested in any one person or organization, the history of Judaism spans more than 3,000 years. Judaism has its roots as a religion in the Middle East during the Bronze Age. Judaism is considered one of the oldest monotheistic religions, the Hebrews and Israelites were already referred to as Jews in later books of the Tanakh such as the Book of Esther, with the term Jews replacing the title Children of Israel. Judaisms texts, traditions and values strongly influenced later Abrahamic religions, including Christianity, Islam, many aspects of Judaism have also directly or indirectly influenced secular Western ethics and civil law. Jews are a group and include those born Jewish and converts to Judaism. In 2015, the world Jewish population was estimated at about 14.3 million, Judaism thus begins with ethical monotheism, the belief that God is one and is concerned with the actions of humankind. According to the Tanakh, God promised Abraham to make of his offspring a great nation, many generations later, he commanded the nation of Israel to love and worship only one God, that is, the Jewish nation is to reciprocate Gods concern for the world. He also commanded the Jewish people to one another, that is. These commandments are but two of a corpus of commandments and laws that constitute this covenant, which is the substance of Judaism

35.
Sanskrit
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Sanskrit is the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, a philosophical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and a literary language and lingua franca of ancient and medieval South Asia. As a result of transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia and parts of Central Asia, as one of the oldest Indo-European languages for which substantial written documentation exists, Sanskrit holds a prominent position in Indo-European studies. The body of Sanskrit literature encompasses a rich tradition of poetry and drama as well as scientific, technical, philosophical, the compositions of Sanskrit were orally transmitted for much of its early history by methods of memorization of exceptional complexity, rigor, and fidelity. Thereafter, variants and derivatives of the Brahmi script came to be used, Sanskrit is today one of the 22 languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, which mandates the Indian government to develop the language. It continues to be used as a ceremonial language in Hindu religious rituals and Buddhist practice in the form of hymns. The Sanskrit verbal adjective sáṃskṛta- may be translated as refined, elaborated, as a term for refined or elaborated speech, the adjective appears only in Epic and Classical Sanskrit in the Manusmṛti and the Mahabharata. The pre-Classical form of Sanskrit is known as Vedic Sanskrit, with the language of the Rigveda being the oldest and most archaic stage preserved, Classical Sanskrit is the standard register as laid out in the grammar of Pāṇini, around the fourth century BCE. Sanskrit, as defined by Pāṇini, evolved out of the earlier Vedic form, the present form of Vedic Sanskrit can be traced back to as early as the second millennium BCE. Scholars often distinguish Vedic Sanskrit and Classical or Pāṇinian Sanskrit as separate dialects, although they are quite similar, they differ in a number of essential points of phonology, vocabulary, grammar and syntax. Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, a collection of hymns, incantations and theological and religio-philosophical discussions in the Brahmanas. Modern linguists consider the metrical hymns of the Rigveda Samhita to be the earliest, for nearly 2000 years, Sanskrit was the language of a cultural order that exerted influence across South Asia, Inner Asia, Southeast Asia, and to a certain extent East Asia. A significant form of post-Vedic Sanskrit is found in the Sanskrit of Indian epic poetry—the Ramayana, the deviations from Pāṇini in the epics are generally considered to be on account of interference from Prakrits, or innovations, and not because they are pre-Paninian. Traditional Sanskrit scholars call such deviations ārṣa, meaning of the ṛṣis, in some contexts, there are also more prakritisms than in Classical Sanskrit proper. There were four principal dialects of classical Sanskrit, paścimottarī, madhyadeśī, pūrvi, the predecessors of the first three dialects are attested in Vedic Brāhmaṇas, of which the first one was regarded as the purest. In the 2001 Census of India,14,035 Indians reported Sanskrit to be their first language, in India, Sanskrit is among the 14 original languages of the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution. The state of Uttarakhand in India has ruled Sanskrit as its official language. In October 2012 social activist Hemant Goswami filed a petition in the Punjab. More than 3,000 Sanskrit works have been composed since Indias independence in 1947, much of this work has been judged of high quality, in comparison to both classical Sanskrit literature and modern literature in other Indian languages

36.
Dharma
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Dharma is a key concept with multiple meanings in the Indian religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism. There is no single word translation for dharma in western languages, in Buddhism dharma means cosmic law and order, but is also applied to the teachings of the Buddha. In Buddhist philosophy, dhamma/dharma is also the term for phenomena, Dharma in Jainism refers to the teachings of tirthankara and the body of doctrine pertaining to the purification and moral transformation of human beings. For Sikhs, the word means the path of righteousness. The Classical Sanskrit noun dharma is a derivation from the root dhṛ, the word dharma was already in use in the historical Vedic religion, and its meaning and conceptual scope has evolved over several millennia. The antonym of dharma is adharma, the Classical Sanskrit noun dharma is a derivation from the root dhṛ, which means to hold, maintain, keep, and takes a meaning of what is established or firm, and hence law. It is derived from an older Vedic Sanskrit n-stem dharman-, with a meaning of bearer, supporter. In the Rigveda, the word appears as an n-stem, dhárman-, figuratively, it means sustainer and supporter. It is semantically similar to the Greek Ethos, in Classical Sanskrit, the noun becomes thematic, dharma-. The word dharma derives from Proto-Indo-European root *dʰer-, which in Sanskrit is reflected as class-1 root √dhṛ, etymologically it is related to Avestan √dar-, Latin firmus, Lithuanian derė́ti, Lithuanian dermė and darna and Old Church Slavonic drъžati. Classical Sanskrit word dharmas would formally match with Latin o-stem firmus from Proto-Indo-European *dʰer-mo-s holding, were it not for its development from earlier Rigvedic n-stem. In Classical Sanskrit, and in the Vedic Sanskrit of the Atharvaveda, in Pāli, it is rendered dhamma. In some contemporary Indian languages and dialects it occurs as dharm. Dharma is a concept of central importance in Indian philosophy and religion and it has multiple meanings in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. It is difficult to provide a concise definition for dharma, as the word has a long and varied history and straddles a complex set of meanings. There is no equivalent single word translation for dharma in western languages, there have been numerous, conflicting attempts to translate ancient Sanskrit literature with the word dharma into German, English and French. The concept, claims Paul Horsch, has caused difficulties for modern commentators and translators. Dharma root is dhri, which means ‘to support, hold and it is the thing that regulates the course of change by not participating in change, but that principle which remains constant

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South Asia
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Topographically, it is dominated by the Indian Plate, which rises above sea level as Nepal and northern parts of India situated south of the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush. South Asia is bounded on the south by the Indian Ocean and on land by West Asia, Central Asia, East Asia, the current territories of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka form the countries of South Asia. The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation is an economic cooperation organisation in the region which was established in 1985, South Asia covers about 5.1 million km², which is 11. 51% of the Asian continent or 3. 4% of the worlds land surface area. The population of South Asia is about 1.749 billion or about one fourth of the worlds population, overall, it accounts for about 39. 49% of Asias population and is home to a vast array of peoples. The area of South Asia and its extent is not clear cut as systemic. Aside from the region of South Asia, formerly part of the British Empire, there is a high degree of variation as to which other countries are included in South Asia. Modern definitions of South Asia are consistent in including Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar is included by some scholars in South Asia, but in Southeast Asia by others. Some do not include Afghanistan, others question whether Afghanistan should be considered a part of South Asia or the Middle East, the mountain countries of Nepal and Bhutan, and the island countries of Sri Lanka and Maldives are generally included as well. Myanmar is often added, and by various deviating definitions based on often substantially different reasons, the British Indian Ocean Territory, the common concept of South Asia is largely inherited from the administrative boundaries of the British Raj, with several exceptions. The Aden Colony, British Somaliland and Singapore, though administered at various times under the Raj, have not been proposed as any part of South Asia. Additionally Burma was administered as part of the Raj until 1937, the 562 princely states that were protected by but not directly ruled by the Raj became administrative parts of South Asia upon joining Union of India or Dominion of Pakistan. China and Myanmar have also applied for the status of members of SAARC. This bloc of countries include two independent countries that were not part of the British Raj – Nepal, and Bhutan, Afghanistan was a British protectorate from 1878 until 1919, after the Afghans lost to the British in the Second Anglo-Afghan war. The United Nations Statistics Divisions scheme of sub-regions include all eight members of the SAARC as part of Southern Asia, population Information Network includes Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka as part of South Asia. Maldives, in view of its characteristics, was admitted as a member Pacific POPIN subregional network only in principle, the Hirschman–Herfindahl index of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific for the region includes only the original seven signatories of SAARC. The British Indian Ocean Territory is connected to the region by a publication of Janes for security considerations, the inclusion of Myanmar in South Asia is without consensus, with many considering it a part of southeast Asia and others including it within South Asia. Afghanistan was of importance to the British colonial empire, especially after the Second Anglo-Afghan War over 1878–1880, Afghanistan remained a British protectorate until 1919, when a treaty with Vladimir Lenin included the granting of independence to Afghanistan. Following Indias partition, Afghanistan has generally included in South Asia

38.
Convention of Kanagawa
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On March 31,1854, the Convention of Kanagawa or Kanagawa Treaty was the first treaty between the United States of America and the Tokugawa Shogunate. Signed under threat of force, it meant the end of Japan’s 220-year-old policy of national seclusion, by opening the ports of Shimoda. It also ensured the safety of American castaways and established the position of an American consul in Japan, the treaty also precipitated the signing of similar treaties establishing diplomatic relations with other western powers. Since the beginning of the century, the Tokugawa shogunate pursued a policy of isolating the country from outside influences. Foreign trade was maintained only with the Dutch and the Chinese and was conducted exclusively at Nagasaki under a government monopoly. This policy had two main objectives, the second objective was fear that foreign trade and the wealth developed would lead to the rise of a daimyō powerful enough to overthrow the ruling Tokugawa clan. Japanese leadership at the time were watching the events take place in China with regards to the Opium Wars being inflicted on them. By the early century, this policy of isolation was increasingly under challenge. In 1844, King William II of the Netherlands sent a letter urging Japan to end the policy on its own before change would be forced from the outside. In 1846, an official American expedition led by Commodore James Biddle arrived in Japan asking for ports to be opened for trade, but was sent away. The Americans were also driven by concepts of Manifest Destiny and the desire to impose the benefits of civilization on what they perceived as backward Asian nations. For the Japanese standpoint, increasing contacts with foreign warships and the disparity between western military technology and the Japanese feudal armies created growing concern. The Japanese had been keeping abreast of events via information gathered from Dutch traders in Dejima and had been forewarned by the Dutch of Perry’s voyage. There was considerable debate in Japan on how best to meet this potential threat to Japan’s economic. Perry arrived with four warships at Uraga, at the mouth of Edo Bay on July 8,1853, despite years of debate on the isolation policy, Perry’s letter created great controversy within the highest levels of the Tokugawa shogunate. Attempting to legitimize any decision taken, Abe polled all of the daimyō for their opinions. The results of the poll also failed to provide Abe with an answer, as of the 61 known responses,19 were in favor of accepting the American demands, and 19 were equally opposed. Of the remainder,14 gave vague responses expressing concern of war,7 suggested making temporary concessions

39.
Western Europe
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Western Europe, or West Europe, is the region comprising the western part of Europe. Below, some different geographic and geopolitical definitions of the term are outlined, prior to the Roman conquest, a large part of Western Europe had adopted the newly developed La Tène culture. This cultural and linguistic division was reinforced by the later political east-west division of the Roman Empire. The division between these two was enhanced during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages by a number of events, the Western Roman Empire collapsed, starting the Early Middle Ages. By contrast, the Eastern Roman Empire, mostly known as the Greek or Byzantine Empire, survived, in East Asia, Western Europe was historically known as taixi in China and taisei in Japan, which literally translates as the Far West. The term Far West became synonymous with Western Europe in China during the Ming dynasty, the Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci was one of the first writers in China to use the Far West as an Asian counterpart to the European concept of the Far East. In his writings, Ricci referred to himself as Matteo of the Far West, the term was still in use in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Post-war Europe would be divided into two spheres, the West, influenced by the United States, and the Eastern Bloc. With the onset of the Cold War, Europe was divided by the Iron Curtain, behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Although some countries were neutral, they were classified according to the nature of their political. This division largely defined the popular perception and understanding of Western Europe, the world changed dramatically with the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. The Federal Republic of Germany peacefully absorbed the German Democratic Republic, COMECON and the Warsaw Pact were dissolved, and in 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Several countries which had part of the Soviet Union regained full independence. Although the term Western Europe was more prominent during the Cold War, it remains much in use, in 1948 the Treaty of Brussels was signed between Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. It was further revisited in 1954 at the Paris Conference, when the Western European Union was established and it was declared defunct in 2011, after the Treaty of Lisbon, and the Treaty of Brussels was terminated. When the Western European Union was dissolved, it had 10 member countries, six member countries, five observer countries. The CIA divides Western Europe into two smaller subregions, regional voting blocs were formed in 1961 to encourage voting to various UN bodies from different regional groups. The European Union is an economic and political union of 28 member states that are located primarily in Europe, some Western and Northern European countries of Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein are members of EFTA, though cooperating to varying degree with the European Union

40.
Middle Ages
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In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or Medieval Period lasted from the 5th to the 15th century. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and merged into the Renaissance, the Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history, classical antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern period. The medieval period is subdivided into the Early, High. Population decline, counterurbanisation, invasion, and movement of peoples, the large-scale movements of the Migration Period, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire. In the seventh century, North Africa and the Middle East—once part of the Byzantine Empire—came under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate, although there were substantial changes in society and political structures, the break with classical antiquity was not complete. The still-sizeable Byzantine Empire survived in the east and remained a major power, the empires law code, the Corpus Juris Civilis or Code of Justinian, was rediscovered in Northern Italy in 1070 and became widely admired later in the Middle Ages. In the West, most kingdoms incorporated the few extant Roman institutions, monasteries were founded as campaigns to Christianise pagan Europe continued. The Franks, under the Carolingian dynasty, briefly established the Carolingian Empire during the later 8th, the Crusades, first preached in 1095, were military attempts by Western European Christians to regain control of the Holy Land from Muslims. Kings became the heads of centralised nation states, reducing crime and violence, intellectual life was marked by scholasticism, a philosophy that emphasised joining faith to reason, and by the founding of universities. Controversy, heresy, and the Western Schism within the Catholic Church paralleled the conflict, civil strife. Cultural and technological developments transformed European society, concluding the Late Middle Ages, the Middle Ages is one of the three major periods in the most enduring scheme for analysing European history, classical civilisation, or Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Modern Period. Medieval writers divided history into periods such as the Six Ages or the Four Empires, when referring to their own times, they spoke of them as being modern. In the 1330s, the humanist and poet Petrarch referred to pre-Christian times as antiqua, leonardo Bruni was the first historian to use tripartite periodisation in his History of the Florentine People. Bruni and later argued that Italy had recovered since Petrarchs time. The Middle Ages first appears in Latin in 1469 as media tempestas or middle season, in early usage, there were many variants, including medium aevum, or middle age, first recorded in 1604, and media saecula, or middle ages, first recorded in 1625. The alternative term medieval derives from medium aevum, tripartite periodisation became standard after the German 17th-century historian Christoph Cellarius divided history into three periods, Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. The most commonly given starting point for the Middle Ages is 476, for Europe as a whole,1500 is often considered to be the end of the Middle Ages, but there is no universally agreed upon end date. English historians often use the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 to mark the end of the period

41.
Greek language
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Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any living language, spanning 34 centuries of written records and its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the major part of its history, other systems, such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, were used previously. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic and many other writing systems. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world, during antiquity, Greek was a widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world and many places beyond. It would eventually become the official parlance of the Byzantine Empire, the language is spoken by at least 13.2 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey, and the Greek diaspora. Greek roots are used to coin new words for other languages, Greek. Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, the earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the worlds oldest recorded living language. Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now extinct Anatolian languages, the Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods, Proto-Greek, the unrecorded but assumed last ancestor of all known varieties of Greek. The unity of Proto-Greek would have ended as Hellenic migrants entered the Greek peninsula sometime in the Neolithic era or the Bronze Age, Mycenaean Greek, the language of the Mycenaean civilisation. It is recorded in the Linear B script on tablets dating from the 15th century BC onwards, Ancient Greek, in its various dialects, the language of the Archaic and Classical periods of the ancient Greek civilisation. It was widely known throughout the Roman Empire, after the Roman conquest of Greece, an unofficial bilingualism of Greek and Latin was established in the city of Rome and Koine Greek became a first or second language in the Roman Empire. The origin of Christianity can also be traced through Koine Greek, Medieval Greek, also known as Byzantine Greek, the continuation of Koine Greek in Byzantine Greece, up to the demise of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century. Much of the written Greek that was used as the language of the Byzantine Empire was an eclectic middle-ground variety based on the tradition of written Koine. Modern Greek, Stemming from Medieval Greek, Modern Greek usages can be traced in the Byzantine period and it is the language used by the modern Greeks, and, apart from Standard Modern Greek, there are several dialects of it. In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia, the historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language is often emphasised. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than a foreign language and it is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, Homeric Greek is probably closer to demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English, Greek is spoken by about 13 million people, mainly in Greece, Albania and Cyprus, but also worldwide by the large Greek diaspora. Greek is the language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population

Muybridge's photographs of The Horse in Motion, 1878, were used to answer the question whether all four feet of a galloping horse are ever off the ground at the same time. This demonstrates a use of photography as an experimental tool in science.

Front page of the Opticae Thesaurus, which included the first printed Latin translation of Alhazen's Book of Optics. The illustration incorporates many examples of optical phenomena including perspective effects, the rainbow, mirrors, and refraction.

The Marquis of Pombal, as the head of the government of Portugal, implemented sweeping socio-economic reforms (abolished slavery, significantly weakened the Inquisition, created the basis for secular public schools and restructured the tax system), effectively ruling as a powerful, progressive dictator

Denmark's minister Johann Struensee, a social reformer, was publicly executed in 1772

Christendom has several meanings. In one contemporary sense, as used in a secular or Protestant context, it may refer …

This T-and-O map, which abstracts the then known world to a cross inscribed within an orb, remakes geography in the service of Christian iconography. More detailed versions place Jerusalem at the center of the world.